DIY your own telepresence robot for $500

We’d all love to have our own personal robot avatar to buy scones for us, but our bank account doesn’t seem in favor of that. If you’re in the same boat but have some fancy DIY skills, you could solve the issue yourself, which is what someone out there decided to do. Johnny Chung Lee, who is well known for some Wiimote and Kinect hacking, has come up with a video chat robot for about $500. All he needed was an iRobot Create and a netbook with Skype, both of which can be purchased for about $250 each. The control software was written by him and the instructions were posted online, so you’ll be able to come up with one of these for yourself. The netbook was mounted on a platform, bringing it closer to human height and a fish-eye lens was added to the webcam, giving you a better view of what is going on. Check out a video of it in action after the jump.