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Gigabot

The Furby and co have often be touted as "smart toys" and have lead to a flurry of imitation toys. The Gigabot has all the same internals as the Furby but in a different shell, and with the recent drop in a price of the toys I decided to pick up two and take a look at them.

Features

Gigabots are toys, simple enough, but these guys come with a 10-15 page manual with a list of various games you can play with them, a vocabulary list and various maintanence tricks. After putting in the batteries (a hefty 4 AAs), the Gigabots jumped to life and started making all sorts of boings, tweeps, lahs, and god-knows what other little noises.

I immediately tried to play some of the games with them, and found that it could be really quite hard to get the Gigabot into any sort of game mode. The Gigabot did react properly to light-dark, orientation, patted on back and stomach etc all very well, as well as being "woken up" by loud noises and other cool little things. The lack of a decent method of playing games with the Gigabot quite limited the interaction between the Gigabot and the owner. Not that I really cared, but for your average kid, I can see them getting bored quickly.

What I found really cool was that the Gigabots talked to each other using IR messages. Position them in front of each other and they'll start "chatting" away. This was quite neat to watch for a while, especially when they taught each other stuff. If one Gigabot is more mature than another it will teach the other Gigabot what it knows. Now, quite whether this is actually what is happening, I'm not too sure, but that is what the manual says...and since the Gigabots mainly speak in Furbish, it is hard to ascertain quite what is going.

Deconstructing Gigabot

The most fun I had with the Gigabot involved taking it apart! The shell could be removed quite easily, although I had to snip off the LEDs and rewire them afterwards. Impressively, the entire system works on one motor, which means that much of the movement you see is pretty random. When the eyes open up, any additional movement will be a side effect of this.

All the components (LEDS, speaker, microphone, IR transmitter/receiver, and motor power) are connected to the IC through a series of connectors, making me think it might not be too hard to hack the components and control them yourself. I know this has been done already on the Internet, and you can now buy a kit that allows you to program your Furby yourself, but it is always more fun to discover this sort of stuff yourself (otherwise it wouldn't really be hacking!).

With the Gigabots now being so cheap, they are fairly disposable too. They should be a lot of fun to mess about with if you have the time.

Conclusion

As a toy, they are fairly limited. They are hard to interact with, learning and speech capabilities seem to be a little over-exaggerated, and there is no sanity switch (can't turn them off!!). As something to take apart and mess with, you can't do too much better. A lot of components to salvage after you're finished, potential to hack and reprogram them, and they're cheap!

6.5

Price: £9.99

Liked: Cool idea, great to take apart, talks to other Gigabots.

Disliked: No sanity switch, interaction erratic at best, no longevity as a toy.

Submitted: 02/06/2001

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