Hacked Furby Knows When You’re Near

One of the classics of circuit bending is to mess around with the clock chip that drives the CPU in simple noise-making toys. [Goran] took this a step further with his Furby hack. Skip down to the video embedded below if you just want to see the results.

After first experiments modifying the Furby’s clock with a string of resistors (YouTube), [Goran] decided to opt for more control, overriding the clock entirely with a square wave coming out of an Arduino. And then, the world became his oyster.

The Furby’s eyes were replaced with ultrasonic distance sensors, and what looks like a speaker was hot-glued into its mouth. Since this particular Furby only “talks” when you pull its tail, he naturally wired in tail-switch control to boot. As [Goran] suggests, a light show is the obvious next step.

If you haven’t pulled apart an electronic toy and played around with glitching it, you don’t know what you’re missing. We’ve got a classic intro to circuit bending, as well as projects that range from the simple to the ridiculously elaborate. It’s a fun introduction to electronics for the young ones as well. Grab a toy noisemaker and get hacking.

7 thoughts on “Hacked Furby Knows When You’re Near

  1. Why doesn’t somebody do something “simple” to resurrect the Millions of Now Useless “Chumby” devices that were Abandoned by Bunnie Huang (and related crew)? “Simple is the key-word here; not weeks of hacking.

  2. Let’s see a disassembly of the pseudo-AI software in the Furby. They were (are) an impressive toy, and I see one manufacturer of a modern (different) toy is using what seems to be similar behaviours and language patterns.

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