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."

Comments

Power Wheels?

[NineNine]

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'.

I dunno bout u...

[king_]

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!!!

Kids had muscles in your day?

[BillyGoatThree]

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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Fun for profit

[rellort]

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. :)

Shades of Logo

[Bonker]

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.