The Meccano Spykee Wi-Fi spy robot lived at this domain from 2007 to 2012. We keep its story alive: the complete history, where the manuals and firmware survive, the community projects it inspired, and the modern kits that carry its spirit. Spykee World is an independent publication, not affiliated with Meccano or Spin Master.
Every Spykee PDF that used to sit at spykeeworld.com/spykee/documents/ is gone from this domain, but working copies survive elsewhere: the Internet Archive still serves all four instruction manuals and all three assembly booklets, and a retailer still hosts the Mac manual live. The tables below map each original file to a verified copy, and every … Read more
Four kits pass the full Spykee test in 2026, meaning you build them from parts, drive them, see live video from onboard, and get real code to change: SunFounder’s PiCar-X at $89.99, Elegoo’s Smart Robot Car Kit V4.0 at $75.99, Hiwonder’s TurboPi at $99.99 before you add a Raspberry Pi, and a homemade ESP32-CAM rover … Read more
Meccano printed “Open source software” on the Spykee’s technical data sheet in 2008, then shipped the robot with a manual admitting the SDK documentation was “NOT AVAILABLE YET.” Under the plastic sat a 200 MHz ARM9 Linux machine on tank treads, so owners wrote their own control software instead of waiting. When the firmware source … Read more
Spykee was a WiFi spy robot sold as a Meccano construction kit: more than 200 parts, twin tank treads, a webcam in the head, and a desktop console that drove it from anywhere with a broadband connection. Meccano showed it at CES 2007 under the name Spyke, renamed it, and shipped it in late 2008. … Read more