THE COMMODORE COLLECTOR

A long time ago I bought a dinosaur robot named Pleo. (From Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pleo) PLEO is an animatronic pet dinosaur toy manufactured by Innvo Labs, a company located in Hong Kong and Nevada. The toy has the appearance and (imagined) behavior of a week-old baby Camarasaurus dinosaur.

Pleo was really cute. Moving around your room, making cute dinosaur sounds. Sometimes hitting the wall or table leg. Since it is a baby dinosaur, you pick it up and point it in the right direction. Wait... Why do I write “was” really cut? Well, after some time Pleo became ill. Pleo was sleeping a lot and not moving that much anymore. I thought it was just a lack of energy so I bought a new battery. Unfortunately, this didn’t work. eventually, Pleo did only make a little wake-up sound and went back to sleep.

I decided to send Pleo to Australia to Dave from the EEVBlog. Maybe he could show how Pleo was working under the hood. Luckily Dave had an old Pleo with no skin. So, no tearing down this nice Pleo.

He made a really nice video in the Mailbag section unboxing Pleo and showing me with (a part of) my Commodore collection. Here a part of the video

Watch the complete video on his channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45C6HFf2kIA

I bought Pleo in 2011 for my daughter Lois. She loved it very much. She was a little scared. After some time, while Pleo was sick, she lost interest and Pleo was stored. It was stored but still in our minds. Then our youngest daugther saw Pleo. She wanted to see it move but was still to sick to do so. I hope Dave will get Pleo to get beter some day and post a video Pleo alive and well.

Here is a photo (during a photoshoot of tableau vivant) of my daughter Sydney with Pleo. When I sent Pleo to Dave I had to promise she could still see him in a video on his site. That was not a difficult promise. She was glad Dave likes him so much that he didn't take him apart.

Camera-based vision system (for light detection and navigation) , Two microphones, binaural hearing , Beat detection (allows Pleo to dance and listen to music). , Touch sensors (head, chin, shoulders, back, feet) (12 in total) , Four ground foot sensors (surface detection) , Fourteen force-feedback sensors, one per joint , Orientation tilt sensor for body position , Infrared mouth sensor for object detection into mouth , Two-way infrared communication with other Pleos , Infrared detection for external objects , 32-bit Atmel ARM7 microprocessor (main processor for Pleo) , 32-bit NXP Semiconductors ARM7 sub-processor (camera system, dedicated audio input processor) , Four 8-bit processors (low-level motor control)

Also, watch this video about Pleo. "The Evolution of the Pleo Puzzle"