The ghost of Pleo.

The tail has four wires, and each pair is connected at a gear. One motor can move the tail from side to side and the other moves it up and down. Combining these two movements in varying proportions gives the tail an amazingly flexible range of motion.

Pleo's central nerve center. There are circuit boards on three sides of the battery compartment.

The three boards visible here are soldered together, making removing these PCBs a challenge.

Looking down at the mechanism to move Pleo's neck. The neck works the same way as the tail, but has only six vertebrae.

There are several major circuit boards that process Pleo's sensors and respond with motor control and speech. There are actually five boards in this image. Three of them are soldered together in his front torso.

There are several Fairchild Semiconductor FAN8100N motor controllers scattered throughout the robot.

Here, as well as on the I/O board in the torso, are 48-pin Toshiba TMP86FH47AUG 8-bit microcontrollers with the markings 06502AI41 F1015M04.

What appears to be the main processor is an Atmel AT91SAMS256 32-bit ARM microprocessor with 256 KB embedded flash.

There is also a National Semiconductor LM2937 500mA positive voltage regulator.

This is the I/O board in the belly with the USB port, SD memory slot and a 48-pin Toshiba TMP86FH47AUG 8-bit microcontroller.

If anyone has any more information about the components inside Pleo, let us know and we'd be happy to post more information here.

This is Pleo. Like every life form, he is tremendously complex. We left most of the gearboxes intact, and we still have dozens of components.

While we didn't break anything, we're not so sure we can put humpty-pleo back together again. We were pretty attached to him, so we may have to get another one.

We have a tremendous amount of respect for the engineering team at Ugobe. We've met them briefly a few times, and they are very eager to push the envelope in human-machine interaction. The cute, friendly exterior of Pleo belies the tremendous complexity required to attain it. Pleo is a surprisingly flexible technology platform, and we're excited to see what third-party programmers can do with it once Ugobe releases their SDK.

We are very excited to see what the creators of Pleo give birth to next!

And no, we're probably not going to sell Pleo parts. Unless we get a lot of requests...