Blog | tag robots

New Furby Hacking and the Sensory RSC-4128

So I am a sucker for robots and the new Furby looks pretty damn cool, so I ordered one, hey it only cost me $30. The new Furny has an off switch, and we all know you should never trust a robot without an off switch. It also responds to voice commands and has a whole bunch more motors and movement than the old Furby.

The furby also has 6 times more memory (512k) than its predecessor. It is powered by a Sensory RSC-4128 chip which is a "single-chip solution providing all hearing, talking and CPU functions". The Furby uses Sensory’s Quick Text to Speaker Independent™ (Quick T2SI) recognition technology, which sounds like it will make hacking a very interesting possibility as it uses text instead of audio files for its speach, there is also a plethora of developer info on the Sensory Inc website, and you can download an IDE.

I am also going to try and get a dev kit. Did I mention it has an off switch? As soon as I get it I will be removing its fur and taking pictures of the process. I will also see what kind if IR fun I can have with it.

After reading through the white paper for the RSC-4128 I can see this is going to be a totally hackable robot.

Wednesday, December 14th, 2005 - Read more...

Getting Fresh with Keepon @ Nextfest

Last night I got a chance to get up close and personal with Keepon, the friendly dancing robot, at the WIRED Nextfest Creative Commons Benefit. I was hoping to see him perform live with Spoon, although honestly I'm more of a Keepon fan than a Spoon fan, but Keepon's performance was in the lobby, not on stage:

Keepon

I had a chance to chat with Marek Michalowski and Hideki Kozima a bit about their robot and they even took off Keepon's pants/dress so I could get a shot of his guts which consist of 4 geared DC motors and a RISC processor to control the motors:

Keepon Lower Guts

They didn't take off his skin, but they said they would for me during the press preview on Thursday. The did let me peak behind the curtain at the beautiful rats nest of cables, interfaces and two MacBooks being used to control the quartet of Keepons.

Keepon Brains

Marek Michalowski and Hideki Kozima showed off their robots to an interested crowd:

Marek Michalowski
and Hideki Kozima demo

Evidently girls really, really, really like dancing squishy robots (I mean really):

Keepon Gets Kissed

You can see more in my Nextfest Creative Commons Benefit gallery.

Tuesday, September 11th, 2007 - Read more...

USC Medical Training Center

Last year I shot a gallery at USC which covered the use of robots for Iraq combat medic training. As I've mentioned before, I love robots.

Here is the intro I wrote for the Heal a Robot, Go to War gallery on Wired.com:

As of last week, 4,000 U.S. soldiers have died in Iraq. While a grim statistic, the number would be much higher without the well-trained medical staff deployed to combat service. Before their tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, many corpsmen, doctors and nurses are trained at specialized facilities with elaborate combat-zone simulations, which include sound effects and realistic robot patients.

The Navy Trauma Training Center, located at the University of Southern California Surgical Skills department, is one of only three training centers in the United States. It is adjacent to the Los Angeles County Hospital, which has the busiest trauma ward in the city, treating about two-dozen gunshot and trauma wounds every day. While this real-world experience is invaluable to enlisted medics, a collection of programmable robots are able to tailor their symptoms and reactions to specific scenarios that doctors will encounter in combat zones.

Here are some of those photos from the gallery. If you want to see them in all their full-resolution glory, click here.

Inside a METI Human Patient Simulator

Dr. DJ Green Holding an IV Bag of Fake B

CyberKnife Radiation Oncology Robot at U

Click here to see the rest of the USC Medical photo gallery.

Monday, January 26th, 2009 - Read more...

New Furby Hacking : Part 1 : Skinning

[New Furby closeup](http://eecue.com/images_archive/eecue-images-24162-New_Furby_closeup.html)Yesterday I went and bought the New Furby which just came out in October this year. The new Furby is a pretty darn advanced toy for only $30, 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.

WARNING : If you take apart Furby it will never be the same once you put it back together, unless you are really good with a sewing needle.

I started by removing the feet which are fastened to Furby with a triangular security screw. The Boxer 62 piece security bit set that I bought at Fry's a few years back contained a triangular bit that was just slightly too large to fit the Furby foot screws, so I filed it down a tad and in it went. After taking off the feet, the clawed under-feet were exposed which were surrounded with little fur booties that just slid off with a little tug. Once I removed the under-feet I could see how the fur was attached to the skeleton.

[New Furby closeup](http://eecue.com/images_archive/eecue-images-24158-New_Furby_Robomonster.html)The fur is glued on in 2 places, which i cut with a sharp knife. The fur also has plastic tabs that go into the base of Furby, which can be pulled out with a little effort. Once you have the base of the fur free from Furby you will have to open up the back of his little fur suit, this back is lightly sewn with just a few stitches and opens easily once you free the first stitch, almost like it was made to come open easily.

After you have opened the back of the suit you can slide it over his head, you will have to snip the small threads at the tips of his ears to get it off over his head, don't snip the big white threads that loop through the plastic ear guides, this is used to track the location of the ears. You will also have to snip the thread on the tip of his mohawk support and the thread wrapped around his eyebrow mover.

Then comes the tricky part and that is the last screw that holds the plastic eye and mouth guides onto the center of the face, at first I tried just pushing a screwdriver right between his eyes and turning but I couldn't get a hold of the screw. Next I tried just twisting the whole thing, but this seemed like it was going to mess up the eyelashes. Finally I just pulled hard on it and it the plastic flexed and popped off the screw. Now Furby is hairless and looks like a cyborg version of Mr. Potato head, sans-bucket of parts.

[New Furby closeup](http://eecue.com/images_archive/eecue-images-24149-Furby_Exoskeleton.html)Furby's shell is closed by 6 screws and once they are removed you can open it up and see the goodies inside. After his shell is open, you will have to unwind the zig-zagging red and black wires, which I think are some kind of antenna to allow the Furby to communicate with its brethren. After you have released and unwound the wires you will need to cut the microphone, as there is no way to get it out of the shell without cutting it. Once you cut the wires in the middle, you will need to strip off the insulation so that the mic can pass through the grommet. The grommet has two sides, to get it out first pry out the outer grommet from the front of the shell and then push on the leads to drive the mic forward and out of the shell. You can then pull out the the rear grommet and use them together to protect the mic although it isn't really necessary.

After pulling the mic, I stripped the cut leads and removed the old leads from the motherboard, then I soldered the mic back on to the mic traces on the motherboard. I suppose this was the first actual hack. I then screwed back on the under-feet, stood Furby up, and switched it on. He worked fine and responded to my request to tell a joke.

I then removed the silicone mouth which was fastened by two screws to the face, once it was free from the face i had to clip two little silicone loops that attached to the beak and tongue, this will probably prevent the Furby from ever working the same again, although I suppose gluing would be possible.

[New Furby closeup](http://eecue.com/images_archive/eecue-images-24154-New_Furby_RSC_4128.html)The next step was to take a look at the motherboard. The motherboard is fastened to Furby with two screws, once you pull it off you will have to remove several snap in connectors, but to really get a good look at it I had to snip the feeding switch leads. Cutting the feeding switch wires was actually a good thing, because it makes feeding Furby much easier (just short the wires together). Here are pictures of the motherboard, the ROM/RAM daughter card and the transistor daughter card. The epoxy blob in the center of the MB is the RSC-4128, I am not yet sure what the other blob is.

[New Furby closeup](http://eecue.com/images_archive/eecue-images-24153-Furby_Motherboard__Note_Diagnostic_Port.html)The coolest thing I saw once I opened up Furby was that the board designers were nice enough to leave nice large pads for the RSC-4128 diagnostic interface, which hopefully should allow programming of the Furby. I am not sure, but I think the diagnostic port is a serial interface. I have ordered the development kit from Sensory Inc, and I'm sure this will help answer some of my questions. If I do end up being able to alter the programming / data on the Furby here are some things I plan on doing:

  • 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

Here is what I plan on doing even if I can change the code or data:

  • Add nicer switches to the make the Skeletal Furby easier to
  • Pet
  • Feed
  • Tickle
  • Turn off
  • LEDs that light up when Furby moves
  • Volume control for the speaker
  • Put the Furby head on a Robosapien body

Here are some relevant links:

Thursday, December 15th, 2005 - Read more...

Heal a Robot, Go to War : WIRED News Gallery

A few weeks ago I toured USC's medical center for WIRED News. One of the interesting things I saw was their Surgical Skills Center. One thing they do there is particularly pertinent to a serious issue in our world, the Iraq War. Click here or on the image below to see the Heal a Robot, Go to War gallery on WIRED News.

[USC Surgical Skills Center : Iraq Training on WIRED News](http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/multimedia/2008/03/gallery_iraq_medical_2 "USC Surgical Skills Center : Iraq Training on WIRED News")

Tuesday, April 1st, 2008 - Read more...

Discount I-Sobot or How to Get Robots Cheap

I love robots. I especially love buying robots at a discount. Discount robots rock.

A couple years ago I found a Robosapien II on eBay by saving a search for "broken robosapien". I bought the robot for a tenth of its retail cost and when it arrived I found that it merely had a loose wire in the controller.

Last year when the I-Sobot was announced I wanted one, but the price was just too high for me to justify. I-Sobots are amazing little robots with a dozen servos that allow them to dance, do kung-fu, somersaults and much more. After watching a few videos showing their capabilities I knew I had to have one.

I saved a search on ebay right then for "broken i-sobot". A few months later that search came up with some matches. I bought two of them, figuring I could use the parts from one to fix the other.

As it turned out one of them just needed to be adjusted. So that was a working I-Sobot for about one tenth the retail cost. Win.

The other I-Sobot worked for the most part, but had some strange errors which I think were related to the processor. Either way, one working I-Sobot, and one semi-working I-Sobot made me happy enough.

If you're in to fixing things and don't mind taking a chance with a broken robot, I highly recommend searching for broken robots on eBay. In all likelihood the bot won't be broken or will just need minor adjustments.

I-Sobots

Thursday, January 22nd, 2009 - Read more...

Nextfest Robot Roundup

The WIRED Nextfest is coming up next week here in Downtown Los Angeles. I am really excited about many of the exhibitions. It's one thing to read about a cool robot online, but to actually see one in real life is even better, as long as it doesn't try and chop off your arm with its sword. I have compiled a list of what I think will be some of the more interesting robots at Nextfest:

Wired Nextfest takes place September 13th through the 16th in the South Hall of the LA Convention Center. Tickets will run you $20 if you're and adult, $15 with a student ID, and kids 2-12 are $5.

UPDATE I have added photos of the robots I saw at Nextfest. You can check out the rest of my photos here: Nextfest Day 1 and Nextfest Day 2.

Friday, September 7th, 2007 - Read more...

Subscribe

Tags (Alpha)

activation-functions  ai  ai-ml  album-names  alexnet  alphago  anomaly-detection  antennas  apple  apple-news  apple-photos  art-center-college-of-design  artificial-intelligence  attention-mechanisms  autoencoders  autonomous-vehicles  autonomous-weapons  backpropagation  bert  big-data  black-hat-2007  blog-series  blogging  books  california  california-academy-of-sciences  canon-r6-mark-ii  canon-rf-2470mm-f-2-8-l-is-usm-lens  caption-generation  caves  celebrity-detection  chatgpt  chemistry  cnn  cnns  communication-with-interplanetary-spacecrafts  computer-vision  convolutional-layers  convolutional-neural-networks  crowdrise  data-denoising  data-extraction  data-privacy  decision-trees  decoder  deep-learning  deep-space-network--dsn-  denoising-autoencoders  dimensionality-reduction  disneyland  drum--n--bass  eecue  embeddings  encoder  engineering-leader  ensemble-learning  ethical-dilemmas  ethics  face-detection  facial-recognition  family  family-trips  feature-extraction  feedforward-neural-networks  fireworks  fnns  food  fully-connected-layers  gans  geeks  general  generative-models  gofundme  golden-gate-park  goldstone-deep-space-communications-complex  gpt  gpt3  gpus  gradient-descent  gru  gtd  ham-radio  hardware-accelerators  health  healthcare  hidden-states  history  image-analysis  image-classification  image-generation  image-keywords  image-processing  image-recognition  imagenet  innovation  interplanetary-spacecrafts  ios  ipad  iphone  japan  koreatown  large-language-models  latent-space  layers  led  lemos-farm  links  llm  locations  los-angeles  loss-functions  lstm  machine-learning  messagepack  military  ml-keyword-detection  ml-photo-scores  mlps  multilayer-perceptrons  music  nasa-jet-propulsion-laboratory--jpl-  natural-language-processing  navwar  neural-networks  neurons  new-mexico  nuclear  object-detection  openai  osxphotos  outdoors  overfitting  parallel-computing  photo-management  photo-sharing  photography  photos  photos-app  pirates  politics  pooling-layers  pyrotechnics  python  radar-imaging  recurrent-neural-networks  reinforcement-learning  rekognition  reverse-engineering  rnn  rnns  robotics  robots  san-bernardino-cave-and-technical-rescue-team  san-francisco  sar  science  security  segmentation  selfsupervised-learning  sequential-data  snarl  space-communication  space-exploration  spawar  speech-recognition  sqlite  support-vector-machines  symbolic-ai  tags-labeling  technical-skills  technology  temporal-dependencies  tensorflow  the-vermont-on-wilshire  time-series-forecasting  tpus  ujet  vaes  variational-autoencoders  vision-transformers  wag  wired  writing  

Tags (Count)

photography  los-angeles  links  general  technology  eecue  politics  security  japan  apple  sar  food  music  science  black-hat-2007  california  outdoors  new-mexico  nuclear  caves  machine-learning  robots  deep-learning  drum--n--bass  geeks  neural-networks  snarl  ai  computer-vision  gpus  gtd  health  natural-language-processing  object-detection  artificial-intelligence  autoencoders  backpropagation  celebrity-detection  chatgpt  cnn  facial-recognition  feature-extraction  fnns  gradient-descent  ham-radio  imagenet  osxphotos  robotics  sequential-data  spawar  sqlite  tpus  writing  activation-functions  ai-ml  album-names  alexnet  alphago  anomaly-detection  antennas  apple-news  apple-photos  art-center-college-of-design  attention-mechanisms  autonomous-vehicles  autonomous-weapons  bert  big-data  blog-series  blogging  books  california-academy-of-sciences  canon-r6-mark-ii  canon-rf-2470mm-f-2-8-l-is-usm-lens  caption-generation  chemistry  cnns  communication-with-interplanetary-spacecrafts  convolutional-layers  convolutional-neural-networks  crowdrise  data-denoising  data-extraction  data-privacy  decision-trees  decoder  deep-space-network--dsn-  denoising-autoencoders  dimensionality-reduction  disneyland  embeddings  encoder  engineering-leader  ensemble-learning  ethical-dilemmas  ethics  face-detection  family  family-trips  feedforward-neural-networks  fireworks  fully-connected-layers  gans  generative-models  gofundme  golden-gate-park  goldstone-deep-space-communications-complex  gpt  gpt3  gru  hardware-accelerators  healthcare  hidden-states  history  image-analysis  image-classification  image-generation  image-keywords  image-processing  image-recognition  innovation  interplanetary-spacecrafts  ios  ipad  iphone  koreatown  large-language-models  latent-space  layers  led  lemos-farm  llm  locations  loss-functions  lstm  messagepack  military  ml-keyword-detection  ml-photo-scores  mlps  multilayer-perceptrons  nasa-jet-propulsion-laboratory--jpl-  navwar  neurons  openai  overfitting  parallel-computing  photo-management  photo-sharing  photos  photos-app  pirates  pooling-layers  pyrotechnics  python  radar-imaging  recurrent-neural-networks  reinforcement-learning  rekognition  reverse-engineering  rnn  rnns  san-bernardino-cave-and-technical-rescue-team  san-francisco  segmentation  selfsupervised-learning  space-communication  space-exploration  speech-recognition  support-vector-machines  symbolic-ai  tags-labeling  technical-skills  temporal-dependencies  tensorflow  the-vermont-on-wilshire  time-series-forecasting  ujet  vaes  variational-autoencoders  vision-transformers  wag  wired