Return of the Nabaztag

Posted on Monday, April 06, 2009 @ 19:29 CET

Two years ago I bought a Nabaztag after reading Aral's posts on playing with it. After watching his presentation at FOTB'07 I made a small Flash app for the Wii browser using SWX. SWX made it dead simple since a) it let you avoid proxy's when pinging the API, and b) the result is sent back as AMF so you don't have to deal with XML parsing in AS2 which is a royal pain (the Wii only supports Flash Player 7 so no AS3 and E4X for you).

Anyways, last week Matt Chotin wrote a post asking for a Flex app to control their QA manager's bunny. The cool thing was that they talked to the guys at Violet (that make the Nabaztag) and they added a crossdomain.xml to the API domain. This means you no longer need a ColdFusion/PHP/SWX middleman and can talk to their API directly from Flash. Sweet!

So I dusted off the bunny and built a quick Flex app that lets you send a message to a bunny and control its ears. To control your own bunny you need to get the serial number and token from the Preferences section of the Nabaztag site. Once you have these, enter them and hit save to store them to a local Shared Object (I'm using a Shared Object to completely bypass the need for anything server-side).

For funsies I turned it into an AIR app that lets you control the ears using a Wiimote via MoteDaemon using my AS3 library. Both the Flex and AIR versions are view source enabled so right click for the goodies.

Since lately I've been delving into iPhone development I threw together a small app that lets you do the same thing from your phone, screenshots below.

But seeing as there is already an app out there that does this and better I don't think I'll be releasing it. Anyways, if you have questions drop me a comment :)

- paulo

Permanent link