Furby Hack Part 1

Hey guys and girls,

 

In my last news update, I talked about hacking a furby and making him talk and understand voice commands...
Well my initial hack of motor control is now complete and I can set the gears in furby to what ever position I need.

As you can see I'm sending commands from a simple C# program on my computer to my microchip by serial, the microchip takes the command and then forwards it onto the PIC16F630, which is the motor control.

This chip knows the current position of the gear and determines which direction to turn will get to the end result faster.
As the motor runs, there is a slotted gear inside furby that is between an IR LED and a IR Photo Diode, every time one of the four slots passes the IR beam, the motor control μC gets a signal pulse and indicates that the gear has moved. The μC counts how many times it gets a pulse and stops the motor when the count is equal to or greater than the input.

The Schmitt hex inverter was used to clean out the signal from the IR Beam but in the end i realised I had forgotten to give power to the logic circuit in furby and I now no longer need the hex inverter.

 

Stay tuned as my next step is to implement the IR receiver (between furby's eyes) and later I will work on Speech synthesis.

Please comment and bookmark this site.

 

Cheers
Roman