Gadgetory

you probably know Sphero as the company behind connected robots like the bb-8 Lightning McQueen and the Sphero mini but now the company is in transition making robots that are more about creating than just acting as toys like the new $150 bolts we're at Spheeris Design Center in Boulder Colorado where we got an early look at the bolts as it was being developed and refined it's also where the company develops and prototypes new products and mid playful reminders of their greatest hits so far spyro's first big product the teachers and students with spark where kids can code and learn how to control the robot from the app and you can start even with no experience you can just draw lines to get it to move you can drag blocks to represent code or you can actually write the actual code in a text editor so it's really scalable from really young kids all the way up to like University both is more sophisticated than spark there's an 8x8 LED matrix that can be programmed to display animations real-time data or even just play a game of snake if you have multiple bolts they communicate with infrared in a game like pac-man for example the ghost ball automatically chases the pac-man ball as you drive it around the room the ball can find north's like a compass and it's also waterproof plus the inductive charging pod gives the battery around 2 hours of play time so we've kind of we're taking a swing in the pendulum is what we call it you're internally um and we go we don't like to say toys or education anymore we like to say entertainment and towards creators so for a while we were making entertainment devices like BBA r2d2 you know lightning mcqueen and spiderman where these they were amazing products but they weren't as really focused on being creative they were focused on interacting with a story but we weren't a lot about robotics through that we learned a lot about bringing things to life we learned a lot about characters and people's play patterns so we're really happy with our entertainment value right so like what we do entertainment lines we got really good at that we also realized that the value for us is like building creators the people who were use our product to make something it takes many moving parts to make a rolling robots this is the electronics room where the products start life so this is all the equipment you actually need microscopes you know that sounds crazy 99% of our soldering is under microscope it solved you know if you look at these parts on here you're putting all of these little super tiny pieces on by hand in this particular space we built bolt and mini so both of those like all the way through their electrical engineering and design were built engineer this is probably the worst station for any robot to come upon this is our electric static testing station so this is the ESD gun it goes at like 50,000 volts or something and you we put robots on this big metal table and we shock the crap out of them tree but it's important because you know the robots go through a lot and you don't want to to create electric electricity inside of the ball it was much worse on like r2d2 cuz yell r2d2 sitting here and like a little metal pad on him and they're like you know like a big part of sphero's appeal is how each robot has a different personality whether that sounds what do sprinters eat expressions all movements Bowles doesn't have a speaker but it is something that company's looking at for future rolling robots we have some cool samples and prototypes of ways to vibrate the shell to make it become a speaker or robot ball that can then talk to you so oh hi mom like it would just get amazing but that's probably one that we're still working on there and Sphero isn't the only one trying to merge cute robots with coding credentials there's the vector and Cosmo BOTS from Anki that have screens to express emotions plus integrated microphones and speakers so you can talk to them but sphere is aiming much more for the classroom than the home three two one go the company is trying to teach us that having fun and learning isn't mutually exclusive just to happy I don't