Furby Given Horrifying New Life with USB Control
To gain control over his Furby—presumably so it wouldn't attack him at night—Paul-Louis Ageneau hacked the toy to make it operable via USB.
If you aren't old enough to remember the Furby craze of the late '90s, then you should count your lucky stars. Furby was an animatronic toy released by Tiger Electronics in 1998. The toy was an instant hit thanks to its cute appearance and interactive capabilities. For instance, each toy would speak Furbish when first purchased, but would "learn" English over time. Furby toys were also terrifying, because they had a knack for waking up in the middle of the night purely out of malice. To ensure that he could frighten guests at will, Paul-Louis Ageneau hacked a Furby to add computer control via USB.
When Furby launched, standard models sold for $35. That meant that Tiger designed the technology inside to be as cheap as possible. While your Furby may have been good at emulating complex behavior, it was actually controlled by hardware that was outdated even back in 1998. Its processor was a MOS Technology 6502, which was already more than two decades old at the time, which Sunplus customized to be even worse than normal. Being a sane man, Ageneau ditched all of the original electronics completely and replaced them with modern components. The only electronic components that he kept were the electric motors, the light sensors, the neck rotation sensor, and the limit switches.
Ageneau started his unholy dissection by skinning the Furby cadaver to gain access to its plastic skeleton. He then connected the motors and sensors to SparkFun's Arduino Pro Micro board. It controls the motors through a TB6612FNG dual H-bridge motor driver. Sound pipes to an 8 ohm speaker through an LM386 amplifier. These electronic components are bulkier than the original PCB, so Ageneau relocated them to the battery compartment. Power now comes from the USB connection. The Arduino is programmed to move in response to commands that come over serial through that USB connection. If you want to tackle a similar project for some reason, Ageneau published his code to GitHub. If you do, you'll end up with a Furby that is completely under you control like it is some sort of voodoo zombie puppet. We can only guess at what dark plans Ageneau has for his.