The Spykee Robot: the Complete History of Meccano’s 2008 WiFi Spy Robot

The retail box printed a web address across the front: www.spykeeworld.com. That is where you registered the robot using the MAC number on its sticker, pulled down the console software, and found the assembly instructions again after the paper ones went in the recycling. This is that address now, under different hands. This site is an independent publication with no connection to Meccano or Spin Master, and it hosts none of their files. What follows is the record: what the robot was, what it could and could not do, what people built on top of it, and what to check before you buy one of the survivors.

What was the Spykee robot?

The manual’s opening line is the cleanest identification on record: “Thank you for your purchase of Spykee, the WiFi Spy Robot by Erector, a brand of the Meccano Company.” Both names show up across the record, on boxes and in the trade press, and they point at one machine. The US radio certification was filed as FCC ID R9P870850 for “Spykee, the WiFi Spy Robot” by Meccano (Hong Kong) Limited.

The developer community had a blunter definition. Announcing an open source controller to the iphonewebdev mailing list in March 2009, David Beckemeyer summed up the hardware in one sentence: “Spykee is essentially a remote-controlled wi-fi webcam that you can drive around similar to an R/C car.” That is the honest floor to set before any of the marketing lands.

What lifted it above a radio control toy was how it got on the network. Spykee joined your home WiFi as a client, the way a laptop does, then took commands and served video over TCP. Its electronics came from a French startup called WaveStorm, per Wikipedia, and almost nothing else about that company survived the decade.

The rest was Meccano being Meccano: “More than 200 parts / Compatible with all Meccano parts,” three models the manual names as Robot, Scorpion or Lunar Vehicle, age 8 and up, a claimed hour and a half of assembly.

Built and powered, it ran three headline tricks. “Spykee is a phone! It can be used as a VOIP phone and Webcam.” “Spykee is an mp3 player!” And the one that earned the word spy: “Spykee has a video surveillance function! When it detects movement, Spykee issues an alarm or sends a picture of the intruder by e-mail.”

Read that list next to the camera spec and the gap opens. The video was QVGA, navigation grade, fine for seeing that someone walked through a doorway and useless for telling you who. Spykee was a telepresence platform in a spy costume, and it sold to eight year olds on the costume.

Was Spykee released in 2007 or 2008?

Both years get published, and the gap between them is a name change. Robotics Today’s datasheet lists Spykee as a 2007 French robot. Wikipedia says it “was conceived in 2006” and “began shipping in the United States in late 2008.”

At CES 2007 the robot was called Spyke, with one E. It never went on sale. Covering CES the following January, Tech Digest reported that the makers “delayed him to get the technology just right” and that the robot “acquired an extra ‘e’ to become Spykee,” with release pushed to “September or October this year now.” Collectors can see both generations sitting on shelves: green Meccano boxes reading SPYKE SPY ROBOT exist alongside the later SPYKEE the Spy robot boxes, photographed side by side on The Old Robots Web Site.

So: announced 2007, shipped 2008. If you only get one date, use 2008.

The price moved during the delay too. TechCrunch in September 2007 said it “costs about $299,” Tech Digest reported a likely 299 Euros in Europe, and by November 2008 a real buyer found one at Costco for $229.99.

The rest of the arc is short. iSpykee cracked the control protocol in 2009. Meccano published the firmware source around May 2010. The official spykeeworld.com site, the registration and download hub since 2007, went dark around 2012 by the Internet Archive’s record, and official support ended with it. In August 2013 Spin Master bought Meccano and kept the Calais factory, the same address printed in the back of the Spykee manual. Neither company published a discontinuation notice that we could find, so treat any page handing you an exact end date with suspicion. The listings simply stopped, and Meccano’s current site still carries a Spykee Vox page as product 870870 with the Spin Master trademark line in the footer.

What was it actually like to build?

Meccano marketed Spykee to children aged 8 and up and claimed roughly 1.5 hours of assembly. The people who actually built one tell a slower story.

The most detailed period account came from the blogger who bought one at Costco in November 2008, and he did not enjoy the first evening. “The building process is overall poor. The instructions are terrible,” he wrote, then went after the parts: “The fasteners that Meccano provide with it are really junk and awful for load bearing.” That second complaint matters more than it sounds. The torso is a stack of perforated plastic girders carrying a battery, a camera head and the tread drive, so load bearing is the whole job.

Two things surprise people who know the robot only from photos. The arms have no motors. They articulate, they pose, and they stay wherever your hands leave them, so every picture of a Spykee reaching for something is a picture of a posed robot. The head does not pan either. The webcam looks wherever the machine points, which is why driving and looking are one action in the console.

The compatibility line on the box was true and is still useful: Spykee takes standard Meccano parts, so a kit that lost a girder in 2011 comes back with generic pieces. The electronics are the irreplaceable half, meaning the chassis holding the WiFi card, the motor units, the head and the battery.

The same buyer confirmed the feature everyone bought it for. “I have been able to use the remote access (from outside on the Internet to the robot behind a NAT/firewall),” he wrote. Whatever else went wrong, the headline trick worked on day one.

What could Spykee do once it was running?

You drove it from a desktop console on a Mac or a Windows PC. No Linux client, which annoyed exactly the audience most likely to care. The window held a d-pad with a turbo mode, a video panel, sound effects, video filters, an MP3 playlist, a surveillance panel and a VOIP button.

Recording what you saw needed outside help. The manual is direct: “To use this function, you must have the VLC software (you can download it for free on http://www.videolan.org/vlc).” A mass market toy shipping with a hard dependency on VideoLAN’s open source player tells you something about the team that built it.

Frame rates split by mode. The data sheet quotes 15 images per second in local mode under optimal conditions and 4 to 15 in remote mode. Remote carried stated bandwidth floors too: “minimum upload speed of 512 Kbps, download speed of 2 Mbps.” In 2008 that ruled out a lot of households, and the manual’s FAQ names specific ISP boxes as “likely not to be in router mode.”

Then the battery, where the honeymoon ended. A 9.6V NiMH pack ran the robot for about an hour under good conditions and took an estimated 3 hours and 30 minutes to refill. Spykee arrived with no charge in it, and the manual warns that “the robot will not charge if it is switched OFF,” a sentence that generates support tickets forever.

Self docking was real and heavily qualified. “When its battery is low, Spykee returns to its recharging station by itself,” says the feature list, then the fine print gives it away: “when it is fully discharged, it cannot return to its base automatically,” and you must “bring it manually to within 1 to 2 metres of the recharging station” for the trick to work at all. The DoBots long term review was blunter: autodocking “is barely working,” and the “charging mechanism is not very good and may quickly reduce the battery life if not fixed by a modification.”

Two more things owners learned the hard way. The robot choked on network names containing spaces, a bug the same reviewers logged as “the router name should not contain spaces.” And it was loud. A South African review named the stealth problem: “You’ll hear the Spykee coming from 100m away, it’s motor isn’t exactly quiet.”

Inside the machine: the official spec sheet

Meccano printed the full technical data sheet in the back of the manual, which was unusual then and is a gift now. Every line below is quoted from that sheet, mirrored on ManualsLib’s scan of pages 36 and 37 and in the English manual PDF still hosted by Conrad.

Look at the expansion row again. A consumer toy that brought out JTAG, serial and i2c, ran Linux on ARM and carried a USB host port was not built by a toy company alone. That is a development board with treads, and the people who noticed spent the next decade proving it.

Two claims from the era do not survive contact with the record. The first is stair climbing. A period feature list circulating on the Robot Reviews forum credited Spykee with it, and the regulars there noted the Amazon page did not confirm it. No demonstration exists. Do not buy one expecting stairs. The second is the open source billing, which Make: repeated in September 2008. That one came true, just not on the schedule the box implied.

How hackers took control of Spykee

The community got there in the wrong order, and that ordering explains why Spykee never became the platform it could have been.

Meccano marketed the robot as open source from launch, but no API or SDK came with it, so the first real opening was reverse engineering. In March 2009 David Beckemeyer shipped iSpykee, billed as the “First release of an open-source implementation of the (binary) Spykee protocol,” written in C under a BSD license, with a controller for Mac OS X, Windows and Linux and an iPhone front end on top. It handled movement, turbo, the headlight, snapshots, motion detection and a low bandwidth mode for Edge networks. A year before Meccano published anything, someone had rebuilt the control layer from the outside.

The source landed around May 2010. Debian developer Petter Reinholdtsen, who built a GPL Perl library on it, records the specifics in the libspykee-perl README: “The source for the firmware was published around Mai 2010. The firmware listen on TCP ports 9000 and 9001, and allow the robot to be controled using a simple package based protocol via TCP.” His library drove the robot, pulled video, and uploaded and played MP3s. The AIR lab wiki at Grenoble confirms the same 2010 date from the French side, describing a minimal Linux firmware released as open source.

Two open ports and a simple packet protocol is a low bar, and people cleared it in every direction. Hackaday covered a gesture control build in April 2009 where the maker “filters out everything but green through his web cam, then wraps his fingers in green tape” to drive the robot by hand. The DoBots review from December 2011 called URBI, the replacement firmware from French robotics company Gostai, “the most attractive” alternative, and noted that modders drove external actuators off the LED outputs, “either directly or via a controller (eg a Arduino board).” The Grenoble lab bolted a Hokuyo URG-04LX-UG01 laser scanner and an Arduino sensor bus onto a Spykee base for a geotechnical inspection project. A 200 MHz toy became a research chassis because its wiring was documented.

The code outlived almost everything else. GitHub still carries zspykee, spykeeWeb, SpykeeServer, the Politecnico di Milano AIRLab repo, Reinholdtsen’s Perl library, and spykee-python, an SDK updated as recently as 2023. Sixteen years after launch you can still drive one of these robots from a Python script. The full project ledger, with what each one does and what still builds, sits in our history of WiFi robot hacking.

The position, and the DoBots writeup got there first: the community “never grew very big” because Meccano promised open and shipped closed. Enthusiasts bought in on the promise, waited two years, and by the time the source appeared the robot was off the shelves. The engineering was right. The timing threw away the audience it was for.

Which Spykee variants actually shipped?

This is the part that costs collectors money, so read it before you bid on anything. Meccano announced a family at CES 2008 and the names all start with Spykee, but the capability does not carry across. The WiFi flagship, the one this page is about, is the treaded robot with the camera head. Everything else is a different machine.

The Spykee Micro is smaller, keeps the treads and the humanoid torso, and ships with a small infrared remote with a circular d-pad; colorways include white with purple and black with purple. No WiFi, no video streaming, just a line of sight infrared toy. The Spykee Vox drops treads for two large wheels, wears a black, white and orange build with an LED matrix face that displays eyes, and docks an iPod nano in the base. The Spykee Cell is a white and red wheeled robot with a phone cradle front and center, run over Bluetooth from a handset; Ubergizmo described it in January 2008 as able to move, snap pictures and send them back to the phone. The Spykee Micro Cell is the small wheeled one with red and orange accents.

Prices at announcement, per the CES 2008 coverage: 199 Euros for the Cell, 149 Euros each for the Vox and for a voice activated model called Miss. That last one deserves a flag. Miss was announced and priced, and no retail listing, box photo or review proving it ever shipped turned up anywhere. The Old Robots Web Site photographs every other variant in the family and has nothing for Miss. Treat it as announced, not released, until someone produces a box.

The pre-rename Spyke is the other collector footnote. Those green Meccano boxes reading SPYKE SPY ROBOT carry the CES 2007 identity, printed before the delay. Same architecture, white and green and grey, one fewer E.

Can you still buy a Spykee in 2026?

Yes, on the used market, and mostly not the model you want. What surfaces on eBay is dominated by new old stock variant kits, the Micro and the Micro Cell in particular, with listing titles like “Erector Meccano Spykee Micro Robot Kit #0860 Ages 7+ IR Remote Control New.” Complete WiFi flagship units are the scarce item, and the ones that appear are usually built, used and missing something.

No going rate from us. Prices on a fifteen year old toy with a handful of listings swing by condition and by whether the seller knows what they have, and we did not record a verified price sample worth publishing. Watch completed listings for a few weeks before deciding what one is worth to you.

What to check, in the order that costs you the most if you get it wrong:

Confirm it is the WiFi model. Twin trapezoid tank treads and a camera head, not two big side wheels. Sellers list every variant as “Spykee robot.” The photo is the only reliable evidence.

Assume the battery is gone. The pack is 9.6V NiMH, it managed about an hour of driving when new, and the charging circuit was documented as hard on cells unless modified. A NiMH pack that has sat since 2012 will not surprise you. Price the robot as if it needs a pack, and read our basics of repairing robot toys before opening anything.

Insist on the charger, ignore the dock. The robot shipped with no charge in it and will not charge while switched off, so a unit arriving without its original supply gives you nothing to test. The recharging station is not worth a premium; it was barely functional when the robot was new.

Count the plastic, then relax about it. Missing girders and brackets are the cheapest problem you can have, because the kit takes standard Meccano parts. Missing electronics are the expensive one: chassis, tread drive units, camera head.

One more thing catches people. The registration flow in the manual points at this domain, and there is no robot registration here. Nothing to sign up for, nothing to activate. The original console software was Mac and Windows only, so if you plan to actually drive one in 2026, the community’s Python and Perl libraries are the practical route. If you want a camera robot a manufacturer still supports, we covered the modern alternatives to Spykee separately.

Where the manuals and firmware live now

Everything Meccano published for Spykee lived on this domain: the PC manual, the free software download page, the Flash site itself. None of it is here now, and we rehost none of it. What we do is point at copies that exist elsewhere, checked as reachable on August 10, 2026.

If you came here from a 2009 forum post looking for a specific file, our Spykee manuals and firmware page carries the full pointer list, capture dates and what each document contains.

The last thing worth saying about Spykee is the thing its own spec sheet said first. Meccano printed “Open source software” on the technical data page of a children’s toy in 2008, then took two years to make it true, by which point the retail moment was gone. What is left is a machine you can still put on your network and still drive from code written this decade, which is a better afterlife than almost any connected gadget of that generation got. The rest of the archive, variant records and software trail included, sits in our Spykee heritage section.