Meet the ARF

Rami Pastrami

— 5 min read

While many little kids had fascinations with dinosaurs or trains, I loved robots. I especially loved Sony's ERS 7.

When I became a slightly taller kid, I made the (financially dubious) decision to buy one and fulfill my childhood dream.

Meet ARF, short for Automated Robotic Friend

ARF is a happy ERS-7 M3 running the Mind 3 software, the latest and last version Sony put out for this series, before they killed support in 2013. It is also the last version of AIBO without any cloud dependency (unlike the modern ERS-1000 series Aibos).

Despite the aging hardware (featuring a whopping 64 MB of RAM!), this little boy can navigate around my room thanks to his fully motorized legs and color camera. He can recognize faces and objects, visually find his own charging base to recharge, and play with his pink ball and bone. He also turns to face you when you speak to him, and can respond to commands (when he feels like it) and talk back as well!

Not sure if my actual doggos appreciated him as I did though.

Given this hardware came out in 2004, it still holds up today as a remarkable piece of engineering.

But what if you want to go further?

Well, the ERS-7 supports wifi, but only 802.11b wifi that is WEP secured. I don't feel like changing my AP settings to use such unsecured slow standards, cause I don't want my home network to be easy script kiddie target practice.

In addition, there is some official software you can run on your computer to connect to Aibo wirelessly. You can have Aibo read your emails or the latest news, or program cute little animations for it, or get full remote control to the robot entirely. There even used to be a system where your Aibo could autonomously wander your house, take pictures of things it deems interesting, and then upload a daily diary to the internet for all to see!

(Ok maybe I don't really want that last feature).

Unfortunately, for any of those softwares, the latest and greatest operating system supported is...

Windows XP.

Hmmmm...

So what is our plan of attack?

Requirements

  • A separate wifi access point for WEP 802.11b that does not allow access to the rest of my network
  • A method to read/write to the memory stick of AIBO
    • Required to put in the Wifi connection info, as well as custom animations
  • A Windows XP instance with certain considerations
    • Must be capable of running the various Aibo softwares
    • Must have sound if I intend to create animations to it
    • Must be able to be on the separate LAN with the separate AP access point so it can talk to ARF

Results

For the wifi, I simply grabbed a shelved mini tplink travel router. A quick visit to its admin page, and I was able to configure it to emit a WEP secured wifi network. Additionally, I do have access to MAC address filtering, and given ARF will be the only one on this network, It's a no brainer for a touch more security

For the memory card reader, I actually picked up a Sony Clie PDA, a PEG-T615C to be more precise.

Why? Well first off its important to buy a Sony brand memory card reader, since the Aibos do funny things with their format tables 3rd party knockoff readers can corrupt easily. The Clie PDAs can act as a USB passthrough mode to act as an official reader. More importantly, they can also run a program called Stickzap, a palm OS software someone wrote to turn generic Sony memory cards to ones that Aibo can recognize as a programmable Aibo memory card (these programmable cards, known for their pink color, are hundreds of dollars on Ebay, so this hack saves us a ton of money). More on Stickzap in a future post.

And as for the XP machine? Well I have a whole Proxmox cluster, so creating a VM was pretty obvious. There were just some specific considerations I needed to make. Mainly, to connect to the Clie PDA and separate wifi AP, I needed physical USB ports. Now while this sounds trivial, almost all online listing for PCIe USB cards (as these can be passed in whole to the VM without much risk) are USB 3.0. But we have windows XP which predates that!

In the end, I purchased the FS-U4L-Pro from Amazon, which has drivers for XP.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07Q2BHHRM

I am not going to go in details of setting up XP for the modern era, but I will post this:

  • A safe SP3 ISO can be grabbed from the Internet Archive here: https://archive.org/details/WinXPProSP3x86
  • Legacy Update is a community run system to get your XP to have the latest patches: https://legacyupdate.net/
  • Snappy Driver installer can be used to grab drivers (as I did for the USB 3.0 card and the USB to Ethernet dongle I used to connect the AP)
  • Don't use Internet Explorer, use MyPal as a web browser instead as it has more modern security measures and can run modern sites better (though keep web browsing to a minimum anyways): https://github.com/Feodor2/Mypal68
  • The windows XP setup experience is so much faster and smoother than modern windows asking to steal your data every 5 seconds wow
  • I downloaded the Palm OS software to connect to the PDA and the Aibo softwares from Internet Archive as well

I also took the risk enabling remote desktop, for easier use and for access to an emulated sound device. For obvious safety reasons, once you get your XP machine setup, take it offline or use your firewall to block communication to the internet!

Connecting to the AIBO

After prepping a static IP for the Aibo, I turned off ARF, flipped him over, and removed his soul/memory stick.

Plugging it into the PDA and with the PDA attached to the PC via USB, I ran the "MS IMPORT" application to have the pda emulate the memory card as a usb stick to Windows. Exploring it by hand we find an html file used as a UI to show the internal files.

Opening up the installed WLAN manager 3 application, I simply filled in the details. After saving to the stick, I ejected the stick safely and put it back into ARF before powering him on. He turned on normally and didnt act different. At least, not till I opened up the Aibo Entertainment Player

Here we can see what Aibo sees, control where he walks, and perform various other movements! Certainly an awesome toy to play around with!

TTS is also an option:

Its just a shame that I have to use such old software to get this all done, through an awkward windows XP VM and an awkward setup. Its also a shame that the onboard processor limits so much of what ARF could do...

Hey, did you know you can execute low level code using the R-Code SDK, which also allows for communication of data over WLAN?

Until next time...

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