Unwrapping the bunny

On time for the easter holidays our newest member at Xaidat arrived: Zoe our  Karotz rabbit! It took about a week for it to arrive. This is how it unpacks:

Karotz user manual

Opening the package #1

Opening the package #2

All parts included

First boot

Initial software update

Our Karotz with custom ears

The initial setup took quite a long time so I guess the firmware version was rather old on our rabbit as the update process took almost 30 minutes. After your new friend is updated you can go to http://www.karotz.com/ and install apps (I guess everything needs apps these days - which is good as I love to customize). The apps come in two flavors and have several options for activations.

Installation

Go to your profile on http://www.karotz.com/, navigate to Appz and one of the category (media, social, news, ..) select the app you want and click install - it installs on your registered device(s) (don't know the exact procedure if you have multiple rabbits). After a few seconds you can watch the rabbit updates itself (led flashes orange) and as soon as the led is turning green again the installation is ready to use.
If you want to uninstall the app navigate to your device in your profile look for the app and click the red X to delete the app from your device.

Local and remote apps

Your device has 256MB internal storage which is available to install local apps to. Local apps as the name suggests are living on your device and once activated run on your device either interacting with the device (ears, led, speaker, camera, rfid, external storage, serial port) or web via HTTP calls.

Remote apps are applications that reside on your own server (e.g. PHP program). The 'installation' procedure is the same as for local apps but they work differently: Once activated the device triggers an HTTP callback providing a unique session-id. Your application can then issue commands to the device using this session-id which has a natural timeout of 15 minutes.

Activation

Apps on your device are not active all the time rather than triggered by various events:

Time scheduler

You can program an installed app to be activated at a specific time of the day per day e.g. having your rabbit tell you the news and weather forecast during breakfast each morning.

Periodically

Have your rabbit activate an app periodically (from 1 minute to every 3 hours) e.g. read the news every 3 hours or let it check your emails every 10 minutes.

Manually

You can also assign one of your included 'Flat Nanoz' (RFID tags) to trigger the app. Once assigned just hold the tag to the nose of your rabbit and the app is started.

Advice

One thing that's not obvious but rather intuitive: To initially register the flat nanoz with your profile/device just hold them to your rabbit's nose. It will tell you that it does not recognize the tag as yours and it is not assigned to any application. After that the tag shows up in your web profile and you can assign it to any application.

Next time I will provide some feedback about programming the rabbit giving it some live. In the meantime Zoe tells its mood every now and then and greets us with forecast of the day in the morning.

If you own a rabbit yourself or have any questions feel free to drop a comment - I'd be glad if I can answer your question.