Over lunch the machinery team was talking about telepresence and mobile solutions and I came up with the idea of abusing a cheap wifi controlled toy tank as base for such a project.

So here I am, having a cheap remote toy spy tank sitting on my desktop - waiting to be hacked :)

The general concept is to attach a bar to that robot and some two way communication capable device on top of that bar so anyone logged into the telepresence bot can have video conversations with someone else standing in front of the device.

The tank

I do have access to the video stream from the robot and some basic ruby class for controlling its movement.

I'll post more info soon. also pictures and stuff.