Open Furby Opens The Furby

Remember Furby? The cute reactive robot was all the rage a few years ago, when the strange chattering creature was found under many a Christmas tree. Most Furbys have been sadly neglected since then, but the Open Furby project aims to give the toy a new lease of life, transforming it into an open source social robot platform.

We’ve featured a few Furby hacks before, such as the wonderful Furby Gurdy and the Internet connected Furby but the Open Furby project aims to create an open platform, rather than creating a specific hack. It works by replacing the brains of the Furby with a FLASH controller that runs the Robot Operating System (ROS), making the Furby much easier to program and control. They have also replaced the eyes with small OLED screens, which means it can do things like show a weather forecast, facebook notification, etc.

It is still in the early stages, but it looks like an interesting project. Personally, I am waiting for the evil Furby that wants to kill you and eat your flesh with that nasty beak…

16 thoughts on “Open Furby Opens The Furby

    1. Make it so that it’s voice activated, and while staring directly into your soul, it will slowly speak; “Have you ever killed someone, just to watch the life drain from their eyes?”

  1. I actually remember fuzzing the COB on these things right when the hacking content starting flaring on the net long ago. One month later I was like: Why am I reverse engineering it?

  2. I imagine that these things are still banned by the Feds. Years ago they had a really bad feeling that someone would buy one for his kid, and bring it back to the office after buying it during lunch. Then the person would forget it, and during the rest of the day the thing would listen to the chatter in the office, which would probably be classified in some fashion, depending on the office in question. He’d as I said forget it, and then the cleaner would go to work and see it, and then instruct it to talk. It would then babble away saying everything it heard, the cleaner would record that, and submit it. The person would bring it back finally the next day, and the kid was ask his father the usual question about what he did that day. The thing would hear him and respond by repeating both day’s discussions.

    1. Heh, there are easier ways to listen to conversations for the cleaner than someone buying a toy, turning it on, somehow keeping it on, since it’ll make noices during the day, then forgetting it at work. The cleaner can just bug the place at will.
      Talking about paranoia.

        1. You don’t need to. Part of the hype around Furby was that it listens you you, then eventually starts talking back in it’s own special Furby language. It turned out though that the talking-back was pretty much time activated. Perhaps it hears a certain amount of sound then starts making more silly noises. But it didn’t actually listen to, or record, any of the content of what it heard, it was just noise or no-noise.

          There was a lot of stuff about this at the time.

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