Here’s one for the ladies (and men, we guess) out there.
[Beth] recently bought a LELO Lyla vibrator for herself, but found operating this wireless vibrator to be an exercise in mood-killing awkwardness. Wanting a more natural interface, she decided to reverse engineer a remote control vibrator. Here’s a cache; [Beth]’s blog has been up and down all day.
The LELO Lyla comes with a wireless control in the form of a neon pink remote. [Beth] thought this remote was a little clunky and felt like programming a VCR – something she doesn’t like in a sex toy. With the goal of improving this remote and allowing for a better user experience, [Beth] tore down this remote and began to build her own.
The new vibrator remote would have to be touchless – there’s nothing that kills the mood faster than mashing buttons. By using ultrasonic sensors, [Beth] would be able to control the intensity of her vibrator by simply waving her hand; a much more natural interface. With the control interface out of the way, the only thing left to do was to figure out how to control the business end of the vibrator.
The remote for a stock LELO Lyla comes with a MSP430 microcontroller and a 2.4 GHz CC2500 radio controlled over an SPI interface. Instead of disassembling the microcontroller and figuring out the firmware from scratch, [Beth] decided to sniff the SPI bus and make her own controller.
After attaching some 0.1″ headers to the stock remote and soldering a few wires to the microcontroller, [Beth] captured the SPI data with a Propeller dev board. By streaming the SPI traffic to a terminal, she was able to figure out exactly how the remote works and set out on building her own.
The new remote was built out of an Arduino Pro Mini, ultrasonic sensor, CC2500 radio and a four digit 7-segment display. After printing an enclosure, [Beth] had a very easy to use, hands free vibrator.
In the video after the break you can see [Beth]’s vibrator in action. She’s still looking for a few more ways to improve it such as predicting the movements of her hand with a phase-locked loop, but for now we’ll just tip our hat to [Beth] for a very awesome hack.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QhXoYcwsEVI&w=470]
pros: There ARE girls who DO know how to deal with a soldering iron.
cons: It seems that they don’t need us anymore. :D
I saw how many replies there were and immediately knew that many of them would be along the lines of “VIBRATOR? EWW” as well as unhelpful suggestions of lifestyle changes.
I’m going to assume most of HAD’s readerbase is male, and also present the observation that everyone masturbates. Yes, this means that girls masturbate as well as boys, and they typically have greater difficulty doing it. Which is something that many (likely male) commenters are completely missing when they jump to conclusions about morality and class while reading this article. (In short: Grow up)
I’m also seeing some of the typically unhelpful “Just get a boyfriend or a husband” advice which is an extremely unsafe and callous answer to give every woman on the internet. I’m not going to tell every male on the internet to just ‘get a girlfriend’ because I know that’s an extremely ignorant answer to generalize everyone with and is extremely mean-spirited as well.
So bravo Beth, you’ve overcome some amazing technical hurdles to create something that fills a niche in your life. Which seems like the definition of a hack to me. Impressive work on reverse engineering the device and finding a way for it to suit your need. Because that’s what hacking is about.
get right to the point, “hacking my vagina ” lol title,
can we see a video of it in situ?,
but this has been allready been done aka the mobile phone vibrating, when you have an incoming call,
come to think of it how about a hack of a dildo shaped phone for ladies/secretaries,
the boss will never have any incoming calls left unsatisfied
The crap about 12 year olds above reminds me of when i was 12. A mate and I came across a box of defective vibrators in a skip, cannibalized some to repair the others and attempted to sell them at school.
*drops monocle into teacup*
Good grief!
Also, tits or GTFO ;)
even geeks have hard ons
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