Pleo Spycam Hack

An "out-of-the-box-Pleo" has a built-in camera to allow basic pattern recognition. Within the Pleo comunity the possibility of face recognition and face tracking has often been mentioned. In our oppinion, this is not realistic using just the actual hardware: On the one hand, the resolution of the camera is to low and the already weak image quality gets even worse by the small Plexiglas-window in front of the pinhole lens. On the other hand, the built in 32-bit NXP ARM 7 sub processor may have to litte calculation power to perform complex real time patter recognition such as face detection. So we came up with the following solution: We use a small RF-spy cam to transmit image data to a PC where it is processed. The PC sends the control commands back to Pleo via RF (s. XBee Hack).