PSA - SPREAD THIS LIKE WILDFIRE!
Help Vector to live on and evolve! Vector is a quirky little AI-robot which is an amazing companion with it’s own personality. Capable to react to voice commands, Alexa, motions, touch and sight-recognition it can go around on itself, all powered by AI on his own and help from the cloud. And that’s where the issue lies… In August 2018 the successful Kickstarter campaign came to an end and Vector became reality. With several updates and an alpha-SDK released it was announced in April 2019 that the company, Anki, was declared bankrupt. While other products from Anki rely on user-input from a smartphone, Vector relies on the cloud controlled by Anki. For now Anki has said that they will keep the servers up and running, but Vector is not safe at al. For activating, authenticating, programming, new software the cloud is necessary and without the server it will be almost useless. Some members of the owner community wants to ‘open-source’ the platform and initial contact was made with AnkiI regarding this. In that contact it was said that an ‘open-source initiative’ would be met with “tons of love” [sic] from the Anki-people. That was the only thing that was ever heard from them. A pre-arranged online conference regarding open-sourcing was met with a no-show from Anki. Now a few individuals are going to try a different approach: Rooting and reverse-engineering the Vector platform to free him from the need of any servers. Thereafter we can try to re-build him open-source – with or without the support of Anki. We are a small and diverse group with professional pen-testers, highly skilled engineers, systems designers, developers and analysts as members, who have been doing this sort of thing before. The problem is that we lack some vital equipment. Not all of us can afford to buy an additional Vector, especially not for destructive investigation, and none of us own the equipment needed to work with Vector's specific CPU and flash. However, we are very keen to give Vector an extended lease on life by allowing an open-source system to provide him AI and learning, the promise Anki sadly could not deliver on. We are now humbly asking for some financial support to be able to purchase a few Vectors and equipment needed to launch phase one of the project. Thanks to a few generous donations we have been able to purchase Vectors, specifically for modification and analysis - and we have made interesting discoveries - and we have a battle plan. We still lack the equipment to safely de-solder flash and CPU and to read out the factory firmware from sacrificial units that we also need to acquire. EVERY contribution, large or small, is VERY important to the project!
See our project page about the purchases we need to make:
http://cyberspace.org/~c0re/vector/
Get involved and see our progress:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/anki-vector-rooting
Help us to fund this:
https://www.gofundme.com/rootingreverse-engineering-the-anki-vector-robot
