Collaborate Disseminate
For those of us who were paying a modicum of attention to the part of the news around 1999 which did not involve the imminent demise of humanity due to …read more Continue reading The NSA’s Furby Artificial Intelligence Scare: FOIA Documents Provide Insight
When you want a backpack that turns heads and gets people talking, you can get ahead of the conversation with a talking backpack. [Nina] created a rucksack with the legendary …read more Continue reading Move Aside Yoda, it’s Furby’s Turn On Luke’s Back
What do you get if you cross a Furby with a master of 20th Century literature? The Borgy. Argentinian hacker [Roni Bandini] found an old Furby and decided to hack it by altering its personality. His inspiration was the Argentinian writer Jorge Louis Borges, one of the pioneers of surrealist writing. The idea is that, at random times during the day, the Borgy will share a bit of wisdom from Borges to inspire and enlighten.
[Roni] hacked the Furby to replace the speaker with a more powerful one, and built a base to hold the larger speaker and a switch …read more
Falling into the marvelous space between, ‘I really want to do that’ and ‘but that’s a lot of work and I’m lazy’ comes this reproduction of the motherboard from the original IBM 5150. This is a complete reproduction of the first PC, being sold as a kit. Yes, chips are included, although I highly doubt they’ve gone through the trouble of finding chips with contemporaneous date codes. We’re dying for a writeup on this one.
Someone has found the source code for the first Furby. [Mark Boldyrev] was talking with a few fellows on the MAME forum to see if …read more
Sometimes you have an idea that is so brilliant and so crazy that you just have to make it a reality. In 2011, [Look Mum No Computer] drew up plans in his notebook for a Furby organ, an organ comprised of a keyboard and a choir of Furbies. For those who don’t know know what a Furby is, it’s a small, cute, furry robotic toy which speaks Furbish and a large selection of human languages. 40 million were sold during its original production run between 1998 and 2000 and many more since. Life intervened though, and, [LMNK] abandoned the Furby …read more
[Zach Levine] wrote in to share a project just completed: a classic Furby packing a Raspberry Pi running Alexa: he calls it Furlexa.
The original Furby product wowed consumers of the 90s. In addition to animatronic movements, it also packed simulated voice learning technology that seemed to allow the Furby to learn to speak. It wasn’t like anything else on the market, and even got the toy banned from NSA’s facilities in case it could spy on them. Elegantly, the robot uses only one motor to move all of its parts, using a variety of plastic gears, levers, and cams …read more
Long before things “went viral” there was always a few “must have” toys each year that were in high demand. Cabbage Patch Kids, Transformers, or Teddy Ruxpin would cause virtual hysteria in parents trying to score a toy for a holiday gift. In 1998, that toy was a Furby — a sort of talking robot pet. You can still buy Furby, and as you might expect a modern one — a Furby Connect — is Internet-enabled and much smarter than previous versions. While the Furby has always been a target for good hacking, anything Internet-enabled can be a target for …read more
YouTube user Jeija called Hasbro’s newest app-updated Furby software “a giant mistake.” Continue reading Hack a Furby to Rickroll Your Friends Through Its Creepy Eyeball Menu
Furbys have been around for a while and they are an interesting (if annoying) toy that will teach the kids to be okay with their eventual robotic overlords. In the meantime, the latest version of the robotic companion/toy/annoyance uses Bluetooth LE to communicate with the owner and [Jeija] has been listening in on the Bluetooth communication, trying to reverse engineer the protocol in order to run code on Furby.
[Jeija] has made a lot of progress and can already control the Furby’s actions, antenna and backlight color, and change the Furby’s emotional state by changing the values of the Furby’s …read more
Behind those glossy eyes are something sinister, grotesque and extremely annoying. Continue reading Furbies Are More Unsettling Than Usual in This Horror Game
