Since I got into embedded devices, I’ve been tearing apart and learning about anything I can get my hands on and dug out my old Brookstone Rover to try and hack it. Someone had already reverse-engineered the protocol to make an Android app (the original was iOS only), but I wanted to see what I could do on the hardware side. I found a couple people who had taken a stab at it since the device has an exposed UART port. Unfortunately, in the process, I ended up bricking the thing. Great opportunity for a resto-mod with full functionality!
The insides were pretty simple; two simple DC motors and some LEDs along with the camera. I used a little DRV8833 board for the motors and hooked the LEDs up right to the GPIOs. Turns out the camera is just USB so I was able to splice a type A header together and it works perfectly on Linux and Windows, even with the microphone!
For the brain, I chose the OrangePi Zero 3. I got it for right around $20 with 1GB of RAM along with a USB port and Wi-Fi which is all I was looking for. I loaded up OrangePi’s Ubuntu image and wrote a quick and dirty flask app to control it but eventually ported it over to remo.tv, a telerobotics platform so anyone could drive it around. I even starting messing around with ROS (Robot Operating System) but it’s difficult to get very far without rotary encoders to get positional data.
Overall, I had fun with the project. These rovers can be found on eBay for $20-30 which is pretty decent for a nearly complete hobby robot platform. I’m hoping this will inspire someone to either grab one of these or dig their old one out and get to modding!
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