Using Johnny Chung Lee’s post as a guide, I was able to get my telepresence robot up and running for the first time. Then plan is to figure out a low cost way for people to tour other hackerspaces remotely and communicate almost as if you were there. I had a friend two states away test it to make sure it actually worked as it should. We temporarily stacked some boxes up on the robot to give the netbook some height so it wasn’t just sitting directly on top of the base. We used Lee’s software to control the robot and drive it around while we had a Google Hangout going full screen on the little netbook on top. The next step is to build a platform or “body” for the netbook to get it up to at least seated height with possible height adjustment as well as a navigation camera pointing down at the ground for driving it around. This beta test also showed that I need to mount some better speakers on the bot as well since the built in speaker on the netbook was hard to hear even at full volume. Perhaps even a pan/tilt camera should be used as the main camera instead of the little one built in to the netbook lid? There are so many options and features we could add! Let us know in the comments if you have a neat hack we could use on this bot.