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CurlyCart: How To Hack Your Power Wheels
Dana Spiegel writes: "A bunch of us were bored one weekend, so we decided to hack a Power Wheels car (you remeber the G.I. Joe jeep and the Barbie car, don't you?) to make it record and playback where you've driven in it. We're continuing development on this project (covered in web page), but mostly this thing is just fun to play with."
Now these guys are serious dorks. This being said I am *so* jealous I didn't think of doing this first.
And this could have practical applications, too: Fr'instance, you could use it to have an autopilot on wheelchairs.. Oh, what am I talking about. This is just nifty.
Brant
Brant
Argle. Bargle.
Pretty cool hack, I would have started with something a little bigger and better myself, but at least they did it instead of talking about things like that as most people do.
:)
One thing I would like to see if this little controlled cart unleashed in the BattleBots Arena. That plastic would be chewed up rather quickly. Would be a joy to watch, though.
Moon Macrosystems. Sun's biggest competitor.
Next weekend you should work on helping me remember where I parked.
Slashdot: Open Source, Closed Minds.
No, in my day, kids actually used what are commonly called muscles. You see, muscles are part of the physical body, underneath the countless fat layers. By using them, primitive people thought that they could derive some benefit from this. This benefit, often called exercise was believed to extend life and lessening the reliance on synth-foods and vita-capsules. What silly, primitive people we were. Little did we know that there was no need to burn calories, potentially losing some of these fatty layers, or, God forbid, doing what was called 'sweating'. We could have just sat in these battery-powered vehicles as children, instead of potentially harming ourselves with this 'exercise'.
If I were hackin on a powerwheels, id drop a 5 litre mustang engine in that sucker with a supercharger. then id race my 5 year old neighbor.. WHAT NOW LIL MAN!!! WHAT NOW!!!
"Think, It aint illegal.....yet" - George Clinton
How do you think technology advances? People learn by doing. How do you think some of the biggest jumps in medical and scientific technology were discovered? Playing around like this :P
Although I can see someone using this to torture their kid brother or sister, or a niece or nephew.
"Bobby, you don't understand, Uncle Sluggo is going to make you toy *better*"
(insert evil laff here)
Or a college fraternity initiation ritual.
"You must ride this for at least one hour, while guzzling down the infamous Slammo Cocktail"
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
I've always thought about driving in the future as something automated, where you enter your final destination in a cimputer, and your car talks to the streets network and takes you in the most direct path.
The greatest feature, and largest problem, with this situation is the fact that there will be no human interaction. Driving is a very dangerous; you're hurling 3 ton pieces of metal at each other at 50 mph, all for the sake of convienience. But driving is something people like to do (if it isn't 5 mph bumper to bumper on your way to work, that is), so we would not want to stop just to save a few lives.
With this system of recording your path, and also a smart driving system that knows not to ram into other drivers and to stop at red lights, you could record that crawl you call a commute once, and then play it every morning. This lets you avoid the monotonous situations, lke reading peoples bumper stickers, and enjoy the good driving times, such as cross country on the open interstate doing 70 mph with the top down.
==Of course, disregard all previous ramblings,==
==as they are due to a positive outlook on life.==
Th
hack my car?? I'll drive it to work one more time and then I can sit back and read the paper every commute after.
I love the smell of Karma in the morning
I definately used to watch too much TV. Now I have the old commercial going through my head. "Pow Pow Power wheels ..."
Don't read this sig cause it's not worth it.
This has real artificial intelligence applications, essentially your "teaching" your robot to remember a route. More interesting if it can find it's way back where it came from, as that is both learning a pattern and then processing it to find a point of origin. This allows possiblity of a feedback loop if you want to get that clever.
Never trust a man in a blue trench coat, Never drive a car when you're dead
I actually had a GI Joe Big Wheel when I was little - a trigger on the handlebars popped some character's head out from the front.
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reverendrich.com
Back in MY day, kids utilized the muscles present in larger organisms known as "parents". The powerhouses could easily tow a small child in a wagon or even lift the child off the ground to a height of around 5 feet. Of course, this presented some safety hazards so the practice has been discontinued.
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324006
Next time I get hammered and leave my stuff at someone's house, I'd like to be able to trace my steps back to figure out what I did from the beginning to the end of the night. Get to work.
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reverendrich.com
How does one manage to hack into something? Do you need special skills or almost anyone can do it? Do you also need a strong programming background?
There's always sufficient, but not always at the right place nor for the right folks.
I remember three- and four-wheel ATV type things and a miniature four-wheel-drive-looking pickup. Used gel-cell batteries that were way expensive. I used to load them up for people when I worked at Wal-Mart.
It reassures me to see stuff like this.
:)
Lately, I've been more of the opinion that fun projects have no potential to ever be profitable. Once upon a time, guys (and they were all guys) did interesting things in their garages for grins and later found out they could get rich. The stories of Wozniak, Jobs, Gates, and Torvalds seem like legends of a bygone era -- a rare cosmic convergence of being the right place at the right time doing the right thing.
Clearly, this tracking technology has commercial uses. The rogue hackers in this story can almost certainly expect phone calls from the likes of General Motors, Daimler-Benz, and Kia.
My advice? Get your patents now, fellas.
-- In the future, everyone will code Perl for 15 minutes. --
The entire project took the four of us all weekend to complete (Friday night to Monday morning, with a normal amount of sleep each night!).
The bold is my emphasis. This is unbelieveable. Putting aside all technical considerations, these guys actually slept during a project! This could be a serious breakthrough! Maybe now I can point to them and tell my boss, "Hey, they got to go home and sleep, and look at the fantastic job they did with that car. Don't you want those kind of results? Yes? Ok, I'm not working this weekend."
Steven
-- I have marked myself unwilling to moderate-- I don't have other accounts to artificially inflate the karma of
With this system, it looks like Ken might get all Eminem on Barbi's plastic butt when he retraces her car's steps to the poolboy's house.
Photos of Ken ridin' around town w/ Barbi's head in the trunk.
For some reason, maybe its the idea of being recorded when I drive my Power Wheels (tm), this reminds me of the cameras in red lights that snapshot when you run a light.
Now this means, not only will I have a picture of me and my hot date running red lights, but I can prove I got to take out that supermodel with my GI Joe car!
Clueless father: "Does Barbie come with Ken?"
Witty store clerk: "Barbie comes with G.I. Joe; she only fakes it with Ken."
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spam spam spam spam spam spam
No one expects the Spammish Repetition!
Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist
Then you should try This (Automated Highwary System) and this (Navlab)
Warn them? They're the ones who submitted the story... They got it coming.
why don't you do something cooler, like hack the fuking refrigerator to open my beer's can ?
Spamme, i like doing it
I wish someone could hack this frigg'n /. effect. Geesh!
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Wooden armaments to battle your imaginary foes!
Now what would be really cool was if I could right a program in the aforementioned display scripting language and have the powerwheel creep out my neighbors by making an unmanned 'morning round' every morning.
Neighbor: "What-what the hell was that?"
Me: That was my brother's powerwheel jeep from 1982. One day, he was hit by a car in it. He was killed, but the controls on the thing were broken anddon't work anymore. Now it just sits around. Every morning, it goes just where he used to ride.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
No, not servers, this message.
How bout you guys stop posting actual HTML links and just put the URL in clear text. That should take care of half the people that would be too lazy to cut and paste.
The British Government is studying using GPS-equipped Barbie cars to restrict the maximum speed at which children can drive in various parts of their yard. Speeds near hazards would be automatically reduced. Parental codes would be needed to travel outside one's own yard. Sidewalk toll accounts would have to be current in order to use sidewalks.
Or as overheard from the Bob & Tom morning show (check your local radio listings):
"We'd like to say she comes with her husband, but she doesn't... she does, however, come with Pedro, the pool boy!" - (as best as I remember)excerpt from 'Trophy Wife Barbie'
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"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
"How un-Slashdot to see Gates bracketed up there with Woz, Jobs and Linus!"
And for that matter, what's Jobs doing in the list at all? The original list was of "technical innovators" which neither Gates nor Jobs is (or was). Gates at least has the distinction of running a highly successful technology company. Whatever you think of Apple, "highly successful" is not really applicable ("limping along" and "fits and starts" both leap to mind).
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324006
Forgive me if this is all addressed on their page - I couldn't get to it.
Okay, I have a hard time figuring out what you mean..
e r.html
You could look up the definition of 'hacking' and go from there. A good defination is at:
http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/jargon/html/entry/hack
Hello A couple of years ago, my wife and I bought a hacked powerwheels car for our kids at a cattle sale. It had the original battery taken out and was replaced with a Large riding lawnmower battery. It had so much power that my kids wore out the gear boxes in the motors. For what it matters, a cattle sale is kinda like a flea market except you can by cattle/fowl as well. Lastly, we used a car battery charger to charge the battery. We are still have the powerwheel car and we hope to get a replacement transmission set for it.
Disclaimer: The site is Slashdotted, so I haven't gotten a chance to look at the actual project and any documentation that it discussed.
However, a while back Slashdot ran a story on hacking barney, the Actimate by Mattel (and Microsoft). Now I know that they had done something with the Barbie as well (though they mentioned it less), which leads me to believe that the GI Joe vehicle in this story is under a similar structure. Yes, obviously these are different products, but I'd imagine that the partnership between MS and Mattel would be consistent in this respect.
I'm curious how overlapped the work between the two groups were, and if there are any globalized consistencies in Mattel products.
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You say you want a revolution?
There was more, but I just got a phone call and I lost my train of thought.
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I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells.
-- Dr. Seuss
Remember the hacked Actimates Barney and Barbie?
If not, check out: http://www.geekchic.com/~jpd/barney
The perfect combo would be a hacked Road-Rage Barney screaming profanities out of the GI Joe Jeep.
If you watch TV news, you know less about the world than if you just drank gin straight from the bottle.
Almost two years ago, a group of friends and I in college modified a power-wheels jeep to be controlled by a 25 lb "portable" Linux box. We yanked out all the pedals, steering wheel, etc, and replaced them with servos and motors.
We also added a pan/tilt video camera and a rotatable sonar range-finding device. We wrote programs that would allow us to move the vehicle, turn its wheels, take pictures, range find, etc. We made it so the vehicle was able to be controlled over a LAN, or the internet, and could send pictures back to a graphic analysis program. Combined with a sonar sweep we had a decent "3D" view of the jeep's surroundings.
All this fun, and we got college credit too...
I meant:
Don't use HREF tags AT ALL. Instead of posting Slashdot, post http://www.slashdot.org. See the diff between an HREF tag and plain text. Sorry if "plain text" is too complicated of a topic for you.
I wonder if this might be useful in determining the course a bee takes...
/* oops I accidentally made a comment, sorry */
I'm one of the guys who hacked the CurlyCart. Fisher-Price encouraged this; they dropped off over a dozen toys to the Lab, and then everyone grabbed one, and tried to make it do something cool(er). Unfortunately, due to the New England snowstorm, their reps weren't able to make it to the lunch meeting last Monday when we presented it, but they'll get video :)
BTW, if you look real close next to my hand in the pic programmer shot, you'll see a CueCat as well. DigitalConvergence via WPP dropped those off :) All I've done with that is linked it up to some perl scripts running my personal library.
That is SOOOOO Funny.......
;-)
That would so cool to freak out the neighbor kids with, and to teach them to NOT ride in the street!
(Old Power Wheels pulls out of driveway and into street).
Car goes up the block, circles three times, and returns...
Kids Screaming in Terror
Me: Yep, that used to be little Johny's car.
Pause for dramatic effect
He took it out into the street one day to play, and SMACK! He got hit by a car, and it knocked him into that wall over there. At least he died instantly, that's what the doctors said.
Now... Now every year his ghost comes back to ride the car one more time.
LongTail SSH Brute Force analysis tool is here!
isn't the fact that you're recording where the cart has gone a privacy issue? do you have a privacy policy?
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in this age of communication i'm just not getting through
back up. Though since the machine runs Linux (RH 6.1) shouldn't it have been able to handle the load? I mean, its a powerful Pentium II 266Mhz! :)
Problem solved.
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Home is where you hang your @.
Having to be shorter than 4" really narrows your options.
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Have fun: Join D.N.A. (National Dyslexics Association)
The point was to keep click-happy people from slashdotting sites.
Let me know when someone hacks a toilet, that I would love to see [root@toilet.root] $ rm -rf dev/toilet/airfreshener.c
"He Who Laughs Last, Is Just A Hand In The Bush" - Ozzy Osbourne
http://smg.media.mit.edu/projects/
And then click on "Curly" on the left menu section.
They've just blocked Direct access to those pages.
If (lastpage_seen=slashdot){
&bugger off;
}
else {
&Let_them_in;
}
LongTail SSH Brute Force analysis tool is here!
When I was a kid I used to have an Omnibot 2000 (robot) that would use an audio tape to record its movements, sort of like this (but different heh). I had coupled this with its built-in alarm clock so that it would come up to my bed to wake me up in the mornings. The cheaper Omnibot also had the same feature I think. I still have that thing in my garage, wonder what it goes for on ebay these days...
--SONET
Any fool can criticize, condemn and complain and most fools do. --Benjamin Franklin
Because it's DaimlerChrysler. For now, anyway.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
smartass
A friend and I hacked one of those once and turned it into an RC car. We used a few relays wired to an RC controller taken from a radio shack remote controlled tank to replace the joysticks. It worked great for a long time. Once we once drove it through water so deep that the motors shorted out and smoke poured out of the battery compartment. All of the insulation on the wires running from the battery compartment to the joysticks had fused into one melted mess. And the damn thing STILL worked after we dried it off even though we never bothered to replace the melted wiring.
maru