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Big Mouth Billy Bass Videoconferencing

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the now-there's-a-project dept.

scubamage writes "Whilst browsing the net today, I found a link to a hardware hacking project by a well established Stanford graduate. His goal is to take those annoyingly popular Big Mouth Billy Bass singing fish, and not only allow users to interface it with their favorite linux box, but also to allow it to lipsync, and eventually be used as a videoconferencing peripheral. Quite an interesting read, complete with step-by-step instructions to make your own, and software source to be played with."

4 of 114 comments (clear)

  1. Mirror by anaphora · · Score: 3, Informative

    While it's not the exact mirror, it's a very similar hack. Clix0r

  2. Site slashdotted.... hit google! by nubbie · · Score: 3, Informative

    Do-It-Yourself Hacked Billy Bass

    The Source

    --
    'Go for the eyes, Boo, go for the eyes, aaarrrrrrrr!' -- Minsc
  3. ts'an old dupe... Does it counts ? by pruneau · · Score: 2, Informative

    Boogie Bass Hacked On January 3rd, 2001 with 102 comments vonmar writes "A 20-second re-recordable message has been hacked into the "Boogie Bass" talking fish. The audio is stored on an ISD 1420P solid-state... Section: Articles > Toys Score: 1.2

    --
    [Pruneau /\o^O/\ warranty void if this .sig is removed]
  4. Re:Sorta OT: InfoGlobe Hacking? by oddbudman · · Score: 2, Informative

    The easiest way to hack it would be to open one up and find out the controller it uses for the LCD display. This is done by reading the chip names off the PCB and typeing them into google. eg.

    HD44780 filetype:pdf
    (generally pdf search gets straight to the datasheet if your lucky :)
    By the looks of things it is ALPHANUMERIC so hacking should be fairly easy as font's etc probably don't need to be handled (unless you want specialised characters).

    Once you have the datasheet you need to find the LCD controller i/o lines that need interfacing then interface them with your PC (Parallel port perhaps)- you will also need to cut/isolate the PCB tracks from the existing controller so the i/o lines don't disagree.

    Alternatively you could interace the LCD to a microcontroller/RS232 interface and use this to transform commands over the pc serial port to commands for the LCDs i/o lines.

    Read up on the HD44780 lcd stuff done for linux to get a head start on interfacing LCDs with Linux.