LeapFrog's Fly is based on digital pen technology from the Swedish company Anoto. But with beefed-up processing power, a wealth of expansion options, and the ability to talk, it's in a category all its own. Digital learning may never be the same.
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Snap-in cartridges are sold in separate expansion packs. Each one holds a 2- to 8-Mbyte application for an activity like language instruction, arithmetic, spelling, interactive journal writing, or game playing.
Brain
A custom CPU sits at the heart of the Fly. This processor churns through grid information, performs voice decompression, produces multichannel polyphonic music, handles interactive character recognition, and executes text-to-speech code. Secondary chips help with memory, audio output, and power management.
Voice Box
The Fly speaks by quickly assembling groups of phonetic building blocks. It understands more than 70,000 words but will pronounce almost anything you throw at it.
Paper
Every piece of Fly Paper ($5 for 75) is printed with a fine mesh of dots. A mapping chip keeps track of where the tip of the pen has been and feeds that data into the CPU. The pen knows where it is within a 1.8-million-square-mile grid. Each unique sheet is a tiny chunk of this space.
Camera
Pressure on the Fly's ball point activates an infrared camera in the tip. The camera records the pen's position on a piece of Fly Paper at 75 time-stamped frames per second, letting the pen "read" everything it writes.
The Flycons
The pen's menu structure is navigated through a series of symbols called Flycons. These are handwritten letters placed in either circles or boxes. Tapping this M, for example, scrolls through the Fly's menu list, which includes games, a scheduler, a calculator, and a note pad. Making a check next to a Flycon (or tapping an existing check) tells the pen to enter the last mode stated.
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