This robot responds to your tweets!

Young engineers at the Kolkata -based Indian operation of French software development company EdifiXio SAS have married robotics to social media. They have created a smart social robot, which can be controlled via twitter. You can tweet with "Bot-So", on your phone, command it to keep a video eye open on your home when you are away, pan its camera or alert you when some motion -- maybe an intruder -- is detected.

Bot-So is the creation of Debraj Dutta, Tapas Bose, Avinaba Majumder and Siddhantha Krishnan -- and they have just won the top prize of the Internet of Things global contest organised by enterprise software leader, Oracle. They wrote the code to control Bot-So in Java -- which is why they have been supported to attend the annual Java One conference in San Francisco in September.

The robot is controlled by a credit card sized computer called Rasberry Pi -- which in three years has become the world's favourite platform for students and startups to create new and compelling applications -- over 3 million units have been sold.

Don't be fooled by its size -- the Rasberry Pi is powered by a Broadcom system-on-a-chip, has 512 MB of on-board RAM, ports versions of free-n-open Linux and can run HD video.

Its latest avatar was launched last week -- the Rasberry Pi B+ -- with more USB ports and a microSD slot. The price remains same -- $ 35 -- or Rs 2900 from Indian editions of global online stores like RS Components or Element 14 -- and a Bangalore store, which calls itself CrazyPi!

IndiaTechOnline