Furby 2012 Arduino Cyborg

More Furby hacking...

Most of the sensors can be accessed from the motor driver board which also is a hub for many of the sensors leads (3 pins for capacitive touch, 6 pins for orientation).

One question is how much control can be achieved via stimulating these various sensors.  Can the eyes be controlled to look in a particular direction (via tilt sensor); Furby will look up when the head capacitive sensor is stimulated.

Using a solid state switch that is activated via TTL, the Furby can be modded to do some weird shit:

The green light is from the Arduino pin 13 LED, the white light signals the solid state relay firing.  PIR sensor in front. Red LED stays on for a while after motion detector is first triggered. When LED goes out, any motion will trigger the solid state relay (white light flashes 2-6 times, indicating relay switching 2-6 times- currently attached to the tongue sensor).  With no motion (or other stimuli) for 2-3 minutes, Furby goes into sleep mode again.

Orientation sensor wires:

Force feeding the little beast:

After too much continuous stimulation
the little beast has just about had it.
 Thank god it was securely tethered the whole time.

FURBY 2012 Hacking

The Furby is back and has some pretty cool LCD eyes.

First order of biz is to wire the little beast up to dedicated power and put a volume control on the speaker.

Simply unplugging the brown wires from the board, add a potentiometer between one of them and the speaker, and slip it all back together again.

Power is provided by 4 AA batteries providing 6 volts or so.  Total voltage needed is likely the familiar 5 volts, and the total current drawn by the Furby around 500 mA peak (when all the motors are gearing), so USB-type power supply will work (max USB output is 500 mA).

The best way to activate the Furby from sleep mode seems to be depressing the tongue.  A sensor (or two or three?) ar under there and some the pins from the sensor board can be accessed from the underside of the mouth.  Three of the most prominent pins got tapped (soldered a 3-wire ribbon cable to them) and one of these seems to wake the Furby when grounded.  Now the Furby can be activated using a simply switch, or... using TTL level with a solid state relay.

Next up is hooking a Arduino up to control (or at least wake and auto "feed", "tickle" and "pet") the Furby.  Capacitance sensors are located on the top of the head and around the body to detect petting and tickling/holding respectively.

Additional references:

1.) Furby 2012 tear down (detailed photos of various circuit boards)
2.) Adafruit Furby taxidermy and partial tear down
3.) Ultrasonic sound control protocol description and Perl Library (via Hack-a-Day)