Slashdot Mirror
Bob The Builder Gets A Personality Transplant
McCarrum writes "Here at 'undisclosed company,' there's been a push to bring a mascot into our IT team. After much discussion and many excellent ideas, the PHB made the executive decision on Bob the Builder. Enter one Bob the Builder talking doll. Talking?! By Crom, that means a chipset! (cue evil laugh) A quick bit of exploratory surgery and a little research later, we purchased the equipment to create EVIL BOB. Want to make your own EVIL BOB? Click the clicky clicky thing!"
http://members.iinet.net.au/~tomday/
generic
DAMN DAMN DAMN I'm a subscriber, so I read the while, stupidly failed to copy it, surfed away and lost it to the geocites cap.
Basically the jist of the story is, the PHB installs this stuffed, talking, toy. They experiment on it, discover voice box to be un-moddable, and buy a replacement one, using their experience with the voice unit of their diesel generator(?), then program and insert said unit. Site includes more details, and cute pictures of toy, including toy with extracted entrails.
"Those who cast the votes decide nothing; those who count the votes decide everything." (attrib. Joseph Stalin)
Mirror
generic
I already checked google and archive.org wayback machine. Nope sorry.
Internet explorer overwrote the cached content for me with the 'No bandwith' page.
The text (from a mirror):
The marvellous transformation of Bob the Builder
Bob the Builder. A lot of people know him, he is an all round Mr. Fix-it handyman sort of chap. He is the subject of a TV show and videos along with much merchandising. Worshipped by a lot of children gave him confidence, possibly buoyed by these successes he ventured into fresh territory. Hostile territory. Where forces lurked beyond his fixing, forces that warped him into a twisted copy of his former self, made him into something that could change between his former chirpy self and something that looked the same but spoke in many voices most of which are not nice. Here is the tale of how this came to pass.
As a morale boosting exercise, Bob the Builder was brought into our office. The idea being that if someone was having a bad day then Bob could help them through it. The model we received has a story book with it and you can read along with Bob by pressing the numbered patches on his body. Bob's voice is bright and chirpy and, above all, all so British. About five minutes after having Bob quite a few people started muttering about making Bob say something else, this just goes to show the danger of lobbing an electronic toy in amongst a mob IS Professionals - the desire to hack things became strong.
So off to google we went to see if anyone else had managed to do the job already. After a bit of a search around we found no hits on hacking a Bob the Builder toy, someone had hacked a talking fish but that was not what we were after. After failing to find anything on Google we did a bit of exploratory surgery by unpicking the stitching. Pulling out the electronic voice box revealed a bit of a setback, the electronics that controlled the voice were sealed under a blob of black epoxy. Evidently, there was no simple way to modify the existing hardware to bend it to our will. Another method needed to be found.
As it happened, not long before Bob turned up we had been digging into our diesel generator voice notification machine with the view to reprogramming it. The voice recorder part of the machine was the APR9600 made by APlus Inc. This chip can provide up to eight short messages, is programmable on the fly and does not need any MPU to perform these functions. In short, the chip was an ideal fit for what we wanted to do. By paralleling the existing switch points used to trigger the original speech segments and switching the speaker outputs between the original chip and the new one we could give Bob a whole new personality but, more importantly, we could keep the original Bob intact which is something we needed to do. We had a plan...
Sourcing the APR9600 was surprisingly difficult but we managed to locate one place that sold them locally which saved us importing one from overseas. We needed a container of some sort to hold the circuitry, given the APR9600 is a 28 pin DIP, an old film canister made a reasonable sized container to provide protection for the circuitry. A piece of veroboard was cut to fit into the canister, the very few passive components required for the operation of the APR9600 fitted fairly easily into the restricted space. The circuit is almost exactly the same as the example given in the applications notes for a eight segment recorder, the only difference is that the input is fed via an external active source (clamped by a couple of paralleled diodes) instead of an electret microphone. The APR9600 is a wonderful device, it handles all the anti-aliasing filtering, AGC, digitisation, storage and playback of the sound samples by itself, the passive components are only there to set the sample rate and the AGC time constant. Once the circuit was built, it was tested on the bench - interestingly enough, the first segment of the APR9600 appears to be factory programmed someone saying some Taiwanese - probably as a factory test. After a short debug the device was fully operational and was mounted into the film
"Those who cast the votes decide nothing; those who count the votes decide everything." (attrib. Joseph Stalin)
Bob the Builder. A lot of people know him, he is an all round Mr. Fix-it handyman sort of chap. He is the subject of a TV show and videos along with much merchandising. Worshipped by a lot of children gave him confidence, possibly buoyed by these successes he ventured into fresh territory. Hostile territory. Where forces lurked beyond his fixing, forces that warped him into a twisted copy of his former self, made him into something that could change between his former chirpy self and something that looked the same but spoke in many voices most of which are not nice. Here is the tale of how this came to pass.
As a morale boosting exercise, Bob the Builder was brought into our office. The idea being that if someone was having a bad day then Bob could help them through it. The model we received has a story book with it and you can read along with Bob by pressing the numbered patches on his body. Bob's voice is bright and chirpy and, above all, all so British. About five minutes after having Bob quite a few people started muttering about making Bob say something else, this just goes to show the danger of lobbing an electronic toy in amongst a mob IS Professionals - the desire to hack things became strong.
So off to google we went to see if anyone else had managed to do the job already. After a bit of a search around we found no hits on hacking a Bob the Builder toy, someone had hacked a talking fish but that was not what we were after. After failing to find anything on Google we did a bit of exploratory surgery by unpicking the stitching. Pulling out the electronic voice box revealed a bit of a setback, the electronics that controlled the voice were sealed under a blob of black epoxy. Evidently, there was no simple way to modify the existing hardware to bend it to our will. Another method needed to be found.
As it happened, not long before Bob turned up we had been digging into our diesel generator voice notification machine with the view to reprogramming it. The voice recorder part of the machine was the APR9600 made by APlus Inc. This chip can provide up to eight short messages, is programmable on the fly and does not need any MPU to perform these functions. In short, the chip was an ideal fit for what we wanted to do. By paralleling the existing switch points used to trigger the original speech segments and switching the speaker outputs between the original chip and the new one we could give Bob a whole new personality but, more importantly, we could keep the original Bob intact which is something we needed to do. We had a plan...
Sourcing the APR9600 was surprisingly difficult but we managed to locate one place that sold them locally which saved us importing one from overseas. We needed a container of some sort to hold the circuitry, given the APR9600 is a 28 pin DIP, an old film canister made a reasonable sized container to provide protection for the circuitry. A piece of veroboard was cut to fit into the canister, the very few passive components required for the operation of the APR9600 fitted fairly easily into the restricted space. The circuit is almost exactly the same as the example given in the applications notes for a eight segment recorder, the only difference is that the input is fed via an external active source (clamped by a couple of paralleled diodes) instead of an electret microphone. The APR9600 is a wonderful device, it handles all the anti-aliasing filtering, AGC, digitisation, storage and playback of the sound samples by itself, the passive components are only there to set the sample rate and the AGC time constant. Once the circuit was built, it was tested on the bench - interestingly enough, the first segment of the APR9600 appears to be factory programmed someone saying some Taiwanese - probably as a factory test. After a short debug the device was fully operational an
Schlock Mercenary.
For the copy-paste impaired...
Second mirror: http://shifted.ca/btb/
He who laughs last is stuck in a time dilation bubble.
Sorry, no. The chip in the doll was pretty much unusable, so we bypassed it (I prefer the word upgrade) to be able to do the new sounds. The bonus was having it so we retained the original Bob personality for when the PHB wanted it, and making it turn Evil when the rest of us had him.
Robert Anton Wilson
um, i dunno... offspring, carpet crawlers, daycare, dora the explorer, the turn of the century, diapers, bottles, expensive formula, early morning visits to the emergency room for a slight fever, temper tantrums, etc. commonly referred to as parenthood, and you're missing quite a bit!
The supplied like to Bob the Builder may not be the official one. Which accoding to my younger friends is Bob the builder. Its actually kept a lot of kids in the hood amused for a good long while, despight being a very unslashdotish flash site.
There are four sorts of people in the world: fools, lunatics, idiots and morons. - Umberto Eco, Foucaut's pendulum.
Something like this has been done before, only with something much more evil, Microsoft Barney. While the hacked Barney doesn't have freeform language, it does have freeform movement and can be remotely controlled.
www.bobandtom.com