New Furby Hacking : Part 1 : Skinning

Dave Bullock of www.eecue.com has hacked the new Furby. Well he hasn’t done much hacking yet, he has removed the skin to expose the inner workings and show what makes the thing tick. “If you haven’t seen one before they are basically armless Mogwais with beaks. New Furbys are powered by the Sensory Inc’s RSC-4128 which is a multi-purpose microprocessor that does everything from voice recognition to text-to-speach to IO to DTMF output. After reading through the white paper for the RSC-4128 I was pretty sure that the Furby would be quite the hackable robot, so I decided to take a look inside and see what hacking would entail.”

Here is what he plans to do if he can alter the default Furby program:
* Give Furby a more colorful vocabulary
* Teach Furby some tasteless jokes
* Change Furby’s voice tone to be less cute and more evil
* Give Furby a funny accent and maybe a lisp and a twitch
* Hook up some of the unused I/O ports to control other things (the chips has 24 I/O ports with 10mA outputs)
* Expand Furby’s memory
* Utilize the voice recording function of the RSC-4128
* Make Furby a voice controlled DTMF dialer
* Utilize the MIDI synth contained in the RSC-4128

It sounds like Dave will be pulling out the soldering iron quite soon and diving into this one. The follow up articles should prove to be quite interesting!

Check out the new Furby video.

Source: eecue.com