In my talk for the Wicket Meetup in Amsterdam last tuesday, I showed a WiFi Rabbit called Nabaztag. This rabbit is used in our company to monitor our applications, build server and issue tracker.
Nabaztag dressed up for Halloween as a vampire
The rabbit maintains a connection through Wifi with a bunch of servers in France. These servers provide all communication to your rabbit: text-to-speech, MP3, weather reports and internet radio. Letting your rabbit talk is as simple as sending a http request to the central servers. Violet has published the API’s where you can rotate the ears, change the led colors and perform text-to-speech in different voices and languages.
The text-to-speech is really nice, but at times the sounds produced are surprising. Whenever a server goes down, our rabbit(s) start yelling. When a server is slow for our users, the rabbits start protesting. When issues are put in our bug tracker, the rabbit announces the issue, and title. When a build fails, the rabbit shouts in anger at us (but in a very polite, british accent with the voice of mrmuggles). There is a nabaztag plugin for Hudson making it easy to setup the rabbit and build notifications.
You can buy these rabbits for your company, and I promised to put a link to where you can shop for them. Probably at this moment, the Amazon shop is the cheapest option, but you have to have patience if you are in Europe.
That rabbit is all stick and no carrot, which is surprising. Shouldn’t he say something nice when you resolve a bug or when the servers speed up again?
Comment by Jonathan Locke — March 27, 2009 @ 4:58 pm
Well, if the build is fixed, it announces it. But doing more would drive my co-workers crazy. We have to fix the nabaztag hudson plugin to support multiple rabbits, and be able to subscribe more than one rabbit to a project.
Comment by dashorst — March 27, 2009 @ 5:19 pm
You can find it in France in all SFR stores, and also in all FNAC stores.
May be I’m wrong but this is produced by a French company.
I think it’s very easy to find in Europe too, go to http://www.nabaztag.com/en/m-16-nabaztag-where-can-i-buy-a-nabaztag.html and search for a sell location.
Not sure I’ll be able to convince my boss to buy one, but I’ll try ^^
Comment by Yann PETIT — March 30, 2009 @ 10:34 am