Slashdot Mirror
Big Mouth Billy Bass Videoconferencing
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."
This is clearly a worthwhile contribution to world culture.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
Now, we have been using iChatAV to do remote collaboration from N. America to New Zealand rather successfully and the video presence is nice, but if I heard my bosses voice coming from a damn fish, I think all order would be lost in the lab. (not to mention respect). :-)
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
Oh, and Geeky Thanksgiving, one and all.
If it wasn't annoying enough already, now there's a possibility that 10 year olds will start yelling "Boo, shithead" into the thing. Joy.
On the flipside, a talking fish, boss' office, you saying "WORSHIP ME FOR I AM YOUR OVERLORD" into a Mic...hmm...
I'm amazing. You aren't. SUCK IT
Excellent, Now it'll be as if the old trout is in the room with me while I'm providing free tech support.
I'll add that to the christmas list. I wonder if I can get one with a blue rinse???
While it's not the exact mirror, it's a very similar hack. Clix0r
When i worked at one of the big 3 computer oems doing support for laptops, a customer called in with one of those and one of our laptops.
:)
He was having a problem with the Billy Bass fish so he managed to rig one of our power supplies to connect to it and the fish started smoking so he called us to repair the fish because we didn't warn him not to connect the power supply to fish.
With the lack of a part number on the fish, we decided not to replace it.
The comes under the same heading as TCP/IP over bongo drums and Evil bob the builder toys - pointless, but exceptionally cool and well worth wasting your time on :)
An infinite number of monkeys will eventually come up with the complete works of
The greatest minds of our generation are too busy trying to get animatronic fish to sing, "Livin' La Vida Loco!"
of those annoying things, someone goes and breaths new life into them. What's next, a practical use for Darl?
Celebrities are like ads, if we all ignore them, they'll just go away.
It's good to see that the wal-mart pcs will have plenty of accessories available for them. All they need now is a mouse made out of a stuffed animal head and a keyboard/gun rack combo.
"Ey Chaaaalie, yah gonna talk with tha fish"
"WHA? Ey, I been a good guy to youz, why youz doin' this to me?"
Regardless, this strikes me as a giant leap in technology. Yessir, no longer are we going to have to put up with low-res, blocky, 5-color, bad-mime-show video. That's right, you've now got a high definition, 3D image right in front of you! Fish smell in 2004...
Please help metamoderate.
I find it incredible that this site is not up. You would think that someone doing this type of hack would realize that it was going to be linked by just about every news service in the world .... well ok maybe just slashdot.
Stay tuned for new sig...
A well established Stanford graduate tried to run a webserver on a Big Mouth Billy Bass singing fish.
Signatures are for stupids.
First there was...
Abraham Lincoln
Then came...
Pirates of the Caribbean
Haunted Mansion
Hall of Presidents
Bear Country Jamboree
And now the latest...
Big Mouth Billy Bass!
Yeah, I'm sure every corporate exec wants to be talking to a fish (with your voice) about important company issues...
"Just one more thing, Fish... Uh, I mean, Johnson."
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Oh my cod!
Blogzine.net
clifgriffin > blog
Do-It-Yourself Hacked Billy Bass
The Source
'Go for the eyes, Boo, go for the eyes, aaarrrrrrrr!' -- Minsc
Is there going to be localization for this project? We don't have bass where I live. I think I might be more comfortable talking into a carp.
I can think of only one real practical use for something like this. At least for the voice conferencing feature. When out of town guests come, it's customary to get them all nice an boozed up. Then, usually about 3am everyone goes to sleep, and guest is left to their own devices on the couch.
At this point, the guest is usually quite drunk, and doesn't have his wits correctly about him. This is when you turn on the billy bass. The host could retire to the other room, start up the laptop with a microphone attached, run his voice through some sort of modifier, and have a great deal of fun with the guest.
The fish would spring to life. "You! Yes, you! What the devil do you think your doing?" Wait to hear a response. "Yes, you, (insert name of guest here). Don't think I haven't been watching you. I know what you're doing."
At this point the host can opt for a number of fun pranks to play on his guest. Everything from a fake spiritual revelation "You know very well that that attractive girlfriend is not a good match for you. It's a sham. Introduce her to your host. It will be good for your soul", to just good hyjinks "It's finally happened, my friend. You've gone insane".
Ahh, what good times could be had.
The Internet is generally stupid
...there are plenty more fish in the sea...
... or instead of wasting his time he should be fishing for better useful things to spend his time with...
...thankyou i'll be here all week
O WAIT!!! I see the connection, Penguin and fish
I know, nobody use a Cameleon do they, or do they? Unoriginal bastards.
Jonathanjk.com
Should do the same thing with a furby, but rip the fur off instead and put a rubber mask over it.
I've thought about using this to announce network events at home (I run a couple of servers useful to those outside my home.)
/. first linked to this site. ;)
I figure, I can spend a lot of time trying to make SNMP traps go to my pager/cell-phone/forwarded phone/mobile email widget, or I can just pipe them to the fish.
Because if the fish on the living room wall starts talking, my wife *will* find me to tell me about it.
Of course, I thought about this a couple of years ago...back when
You have violated Robot's Rules of Order and will be asked to leave the future immediately.
...Beowulf shoal of these.
It turns out fish are deathly afraid of nets.
The parent post shows clearly why we now need a new category so that we can score posts "-1, Needs a sense of humour".
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
The world is full of stuff we don't like, it takes some bad karma to have to go to the trouble of putting together a comment to express one's dissatisfaction with something, especially one that isn't humourous or satirical.
Oh come on, that was the funniest thing I've seen all week. If I had mod points, they'd be going to the parent post.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
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.
Someone modded this funny, but it's actually true!
In one of the more bizzare rulings, the courts determined that any tape manufactured for use in the Teddy Ruxpin (but not approved by the original maker) violated the copyright holder's exclusive rights regarding public performance...
Personally, I think that's a bit odd.