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Old Toy Modding?
Sqwubbsy writes "Stumbling through Google, looking for info on the Big Trak by Milton Bradley, I came across an article about one that was retrofitted with an OOPic controller. I was wondering if anyone else had a good story about a retrofitted toy that they beefed up?"
let the dildo jokes begin
My BigTrak was the first thing I ever hacked, I even bough up[ everyone I could from kids in the neighborhood, as well as garage sales etc. I actually built my first robot using parts from a BigTrak, it was much like a Hero and I used a modified Armitron (Which I just bought my son ne just like mine from an antique dealer he loves it)
:)
I never in my like imagined there was anyone else out there who hacked a BigTrak I was about 10 when they came out and it was my dad's idea, he came home after we had discussed buying a Hero Kit to find I had pulled my armitron and BigTrak apart and was mocking up the Body of the robot, another 6 months and we had something nearly as cool as a real Hero, at least to me
Been toying with the idea of modding my old Speak n Spell and Speak n Math to teach my kids basic algebra.
And I've got a friend that's been studying the Teddy Ruxpin story tapes to figure out the hidden signals to control the movements of the bear. His ultimate goal is to have the bear read stories from Penthouse with all face movements synced.
No boom today. Boom tomorrow. There's always a boom tomorrow. - Cmdr. Susan Ivanova
After a recent story about Meccano (like the Erector set), I did some searching and found numerous sites which had Meccano clocks. One of the sites mentioned a modified escapement to make a Reifler clock, which is one of the most accurate mechanical clocks. If anyone finds any plans or kits to make a clock like this in Meccano, please post links. One of these would make a great addition to my desk.
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Well, you all probably don't want to hear what I...I mean my friend...did to a lifesize barbie doll.
The making of the Falcon...
This guy put a PC in a Falcon... kinda cool.
I took it to school once and my home room teacher had me program it to go across the hall and shoot the laser cannon at the old, old teacher in that room, and then retreat. Everyone had a good laugh about it, but the sad thing is if my son did that today, he'd probably get expelled or be forced to see a shrink.
Too bad some of his links in the story point to documents on his C: drive.
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
I've picked up three plastic kits of the Jupiter C rocket, Hawk models circa 1958, built two so far and converted them to fly with model rocket engines and recover by parachute.
I fly them from a launch pad made from an Erector Set Rocket Launcher kit with the appropriate additions for the launch rail.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
- Use GPS to determine where it currently is
- Do an A* Search to plan a path to the destination
- Use GPS for navigation
- Use sonar for obstacle avoidance
Negative obstacles are going to be a problem (i.e. holes in the ground , stairs, bottomless pits, etc).First I took an old DeLorean model car...
Then...
www.bannination.com Two things float to the top he
Wouldn't having OO all the time make you extrelemy vunerable to SB? I mean, you can't stay sealed forever...
I never had a Big Trak (although friends did), but I had a similar toy that was a programmable Corvette. I picked it up at a garage sale for a few bucks in the early 80s, and it was great! I wonder what happened to it? It would be a lot of fun to hack, now that I have the engineering background to do it!
Useless for pretty much anything until I turned it into a pan/tilt webcam mount.
If by modding you mean, "blow it up with firecrackers to see what it does."
Laboratree - Scientific collaboration based on OpenSocial.
"modding" would be putting it generously, but i've done some circuit bending in my day with the goal of getting creepy noises out of various toys.
I always wanted the Big Trak, but it was out of my price range. Some of my friends had them though.
But, this brings back memories of all those cool toys.. Like the Stomper 4x4. Now, those were affordable fun.
some guy moaning he messed up his life :)
:D
Any way. I'm thinking of trying to mod my old Gameboys to use as mini monitors so I can play GB roms on a real GB
--- [Insert intresting Sig here]
Well I had a story about a blow up doll that I had modified with a two horsepower wet/dry shopvac, but I've been too busy healing up from all of the skin grafts to post it.
cheap labor conservatives - they want to keep you hungry enough to be thankful for minimum wage.
I picked up a few for like $10 apiece at walgreens (i'd seen em elsewhere for $40). Had to put a resistor in to lower the volume (they were loud), other than that havn't done much, but there are lots of mods out there, articulated bodies, extra legs etc, all combined with a rudimentary AI for a kickass toy.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
and cannibalized the parts to do other things... those little electric motors and gears were useful for all kinds of stuff.
This was all after I got bored/frustrated with it, of course.
The most frustrating thing about the big trak was that it never got its turning radii correct... if you told it to turn right 90 degrees, it was always off by several degrees, enough that it would subsequently bump into a wall or corner. Adding in the corrections for all those not-quite-90-degree turns was a hassle, so I introduced Big Trak to Mr. screwdriver.
I did miss the laser-cannon effect though... that was pretty cool in a dark room.
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
After my washing machine refused to wash my socks one time too many, I decided to rebuild it... http://www.migweb.co.uk/forums/showthread.php?t=13 1398
Ok. Sounds just about like every computer I've ever owned for more than a year. Sometimes there are strange smells, too.
The owls are not what they seem
yeah, I once "modded" an old GI Joe figure with a "jet pack" strapped to his back (about 3 or 4 regular bottle rockets with fuses twisted together). amazingly enough it DID fly up about 10ft into the air and actually HOVERED there in a relatively fixed position for a few seconds. unfortunately, there was apparently a manufacturer's "defect" which caused the "jet pack" to explode and letters to be sent to next of kin.
You can get a lot of uC's cheap, but you have to (a) make hardware for them and (b) program in assembler or shell out some big bucks for development environment. Then you spend so much time doing housekeeping code you've lost any interest in the project.
If you want to get into in microcontrollers, the oopic is a great place to start. The oopic (based on the microchip PICMicro chips) has an on-board object oriented programming language based around hardware objects (dc motors, servos, etc). The software is free. You code a few lines up and *bingo* working robotics.
Then after you've used them for a while, you can move up to bigger and more powerful things. Atmel cpus, PICMicros in assembler and C, TINI boards.
(Technical side-note: I believe I had a AC-DC converter involved in this somewhere, but it's been 15 years and I don't remember)
I took some of my old toys and modded them into cold hard cash.
But that was 10 years ago.
I've turned remote control cars in to various forms of robots; line following, sumo, etc.
It costs a fraction of the price of buying comparable parts from a normal supplier, and a lot of the mechanical work is done for you. Jason
ProfQuotes
Is it already slashdotted?
Just a wild guess.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
I didn't have the Big Trak, but I had the Corvette. Somewhere, in my pile of toys from childhood it still resides (stuff I couldn't part with - the Corvette, a Donkey Kong portable game that looks like a mini-Donkey Kong cabinet, cool stuff like that) My problem with it was that I had always wished it was more programable - I managed to hit it's limits for programmability pretty quick. Now, if it had had more sensors, a programming port (upload a new program from, say, the C64) I wouldn't have gotten bored with it. But, it was cool enough that it's still in the pile of cool toys :-)
Davis Ray Sickmon, Jr - looking for something to read? Check out my three free novels at MidnightRyder.org
What an unfair Ask Slashdot this is. How am I supposed to be feeling now? All I ever got for Christmas is this piece of charcoal. :'(
Check out for a basic explanation and introduction to circuit bending.
Banaaaana!
I stopped modding my toys after too many of them became sentient. It's a big hassle when they're always trying to escape or some nefarious government agency is trying to capture them to turn them into a super weapon.
We still use LEGOs to visualize some inverse kinematics before implementing them in a software project I'm in. And a friend once built a gas pedal for his AMIGA joystick using Legos. Unfortunately, you had to be extremely careful not to hit the brake and accelerate at the same time - the machine would immediately crash if you did it :)
I took a sears palm sander and fitted it with a latex rubber pad and used it on my girlfriend's cl1t. needless to say, she left me and stole my sander. :-(
I can program anything, and I can hack most mechanical things, but I suck at the electronics level. Is there a place where coders with ideas can work with electronics engineering types to actualise fun ideas?
Last time i checked, the Nerf modding community was going pretty strong.
I've seen old, and relatively newer guns, modded to insane degrees, such as adding a CO2 cartridge so you don't have to pull back on the thing.
When I was about 14 I got a Omni Jnr robot from a car boot sale for a few quid. It had tank type steering, a bump sensor on the front, flashing lights, and some preprogrammed bits of speech when you touched various bits.
He would autonomously move round, bump into things, say sorry, then reverse and turn, and do the same thing. You could also put him in remote mode and control him with the ultrasonic handheld control.
After a while, he got boring and expensive, eating all the batteries up. So switches went in to turn off the speaker, and to turn off the flashing eyes. I also put in a switch to turn off his bump sensor, but I can't remember why.
Computer control and remote power was what it needed. A huge length of ribbon cable was obtained from a skip, and I fed power down it, as well as soldering the other wires so that they could use the motor controller inside.
The next few weeks were spent hacking away at my C64 with an old broken cartridge and the user port. Eventually, I got reliable control of the robot... now I had real power.
I didn't really know what I was doing, but was pretty proficient at basic, so I wrote an application to map my house. You would time how long he went until he hit something, then back up, turn left, and do the same. From the time, you could infer distance. It would have worked, bar the fact that the speed changed all the time, and the umbilical cable caused loads of drag. Sometimes it gave reasonable results.
Unfortunately he got binned when my dad cleared out my shed.
Everyone has probably tried to mod an R/C car at some point. You can hook up a 9.6V battery to a 6V car and get some extra speed (R/C overclocking!), for instance. I've replaced a ton of motors in my life, but nothing really satisfied my need for an ultra fast car, until I saw something in Wal-Mart.
Wal-Mart sells huge R/C Hummer H2s. If you've seen them, you'll know what I mean. They're probably 2.5 feet long.
I bought one and ripped out the interior, then modded in a 1.5 hp gas motor from an old grass trimmer. 1.5 hp is plenty quick enough for a toy. Besides fitting the motor to turn the wheels (only the back... couldn't get 4WD working because the motor covered the cog that turns all 4 wheels) the hardest part was getting the R/C's throttle to work the gas motor's throttle, but after a little tweaking and super glue it worked pretty good. The gas tank from the trimmer went in the very back of the truck.
I'm sure plenty of you are into R/C cars. I'm actually not and have never built one before, so I don't know how powerful those motors are. They can't possibly be 1.5 hp or be anywhere near as powerful as this trimmer motor because the truck was completely undrivable. Full throttle from a standing start would turn the back wheels so fast the truck would flip onto its back. Easing it up to full speed would send the truck going well past the 60km/h speed limit on the main street near me. The truck couldn't turn at that speed because it would immediately flip about three dozen times. The truck stopped working after my first high speed turn after the jarring flips broke the body and knocked some of the mechanical parts loose. It broke forever on my second day playing with it after the cogs connecting the motor to the wheels broke. I could replace them with parts from a hobby store, but it's almost more fun to look at the broken truck knowing I modded it into destruction.
The global economy is a great thing until you feel it locally.
article text:
Retrofitting a Big Trak with an OOPic
Back in late 1979, Milton Bradley created a programmable 6 wheeled vehicle called the Big Trak. It was capable of performing 8 different functions and was considered programmable because it could store and play back a sequence of up to 16 of those functions. After reading the article in Ciarcia's Circuit Cellar Volume III, which was about creating a remote control for the Big Trak, my friend Louie ask for, and received one of these for Christmas of '82. We quickly exhausted all the creativeness we could muster out of Forward, Reverse, Left, Right, Fire, Repeat, Delay, & Dump trailer and decided that it was time that we take it apart and do something else with it.
Armed with an assortment of tools, we carefully poked, prodded and pried until the Big Trak was dissected. What we found inside was:
* 1 circuit board populated with 2 integrated circuits, 4 transistors and several other miscellaneous components.
* 1 24-key keypad
* 1 light bulb
* 1 speaker
* 1 dual dc-motor gear box with an optical encoder
* 1 9-Volt battery clip
* 1 4-cell D-sized battery box
Our focus quickly turned to the larger of the two ICs found on the circuit board. The IC was labeled TMS1000NLL and being the larger of the two ICs, it would be the microcontroller. If we were going to be able to program the Big Trak to something other than its original functions, the TMS1000 would have to be reprogrammed.
The TMS1000 Microcontroller was a Texas Instruments device. All the information that we had on this IC came from the Ciarcia's Circuit Cellar article which was quite clear in the fact that this IC could not be reprogrammed. What we needed was a small, lightweight computer that could be quickly reprogrammed, had at least 19 I/O lines and could be powered by batteries
At the time that we were doing this, we had two computers. A commodore-64 and an Atari 800. After some deliberation on whether or not the Big Trak could hold the weight of one of those computers plus some extra batteries mounted to the top of it, we decided that the Big Trak would just have to stay in its original condition. That is... until 18 years later.
The OOPic microcontroller is lightweight, fits nicely on the back of the Big Trak, has 31 I/O lines and requires no additional batteries other than the ones that the Big Trak used already. And even with the Big Trak using 19 I/O lines, there are still 12 I/O lines available for future expansion.
To mount the OOPic on the Big Trak, the panel on the back of the Big Trak was removed and 4 holes were drilled into the 4-cell D-sized battery case. The four screws were inserted from inside the battery case and nuts were then put on. This holds the screws in place and provides a stand-off for the OOPic. The OOPic was then placed on the screws, with the 40-pin connector towards the top, and 4 more nuts were added to secure it in place.
In the Big Trak's design, the TMS1000 was powered directly by the 9-Volt battery. This is very convenient because it brought 9-Volts directly to one of the pins on the TMS1000. As well as the power, all of the I/O used by the electronics of the Big Trak also connects to the pins of the TMS1000. Since every connection that the OOPic needs goes through the 28 pins of the TMS1000, all that will be needed to connect the OOPic to the Big Trak is a single 40-pin ribbon cable which will run from the OOPic to an adapter which will then plug into the same place that the TMS1000 is connected.
Before any connections can be made to the OOPic, the Big Trak's TMS1000 needs to be removed and replaced with a 28-pin socket. When the TMS1000's was desoldered, extra care was given to the traces on the circuit board. Since the circuit board only has traces on one side and the holes are not plated through, it is very easy to have some of the traces lift off of the circuit board. This can happen when too much heat from the soldering iron is applied for too
In the early nineties, Mattel had an infamous Barbie doll that told girls gems like "Math is hard. ..giggle.." Some activists broke into a warehouse and swapped boards between the GI-Joes and Barbies so that the Barbies were saying things like "Stop Cobra!".
http://ifaq.wap.org/posters/barbiedir.pdf
Oh yeah, I have a network enabled Mr. Potato head.
/^([Ss]ame [Bb]at (time, |channel.)){2}$/
is full of old toys and electronics for modding into robots. The old toys make for great platforms that are often being thrown away (read: free) which greatly reduces the cost of robotics as a hobby. I find garage sales and, for the brave, trash bins to be great places for these.
-Tim Louden
PORK!
-Adam
I'm sure many (most? all?) of us at one time or another have modded the packages the toys came in. My favorite package mod is the tennis ball cannon. I long thought this was something every kid had done since it was so common in my neighborhood, but I've since learned many children did not create recreational explosive devices, so I'll briefly explain the cannon.
Materials: can of tennis balls (the old metal kind), lighter fluid.
Tools needed: can opener, matches.
Procedure: 1) Open the can of balls in the usual manner. 2) Using a "triangle punch" style can opener puncture a hole in the SIDE of the can at the closed end. 3) Make a small dent in the can about 3 inches from the closed end so that a tennis ball dropped in the open end will lodge inside and leave an open volume at the base of the can. 4) Set the can closed end down on the ground making sure the open end is not pointing in the direction of anything you might miss if impacted by a tennis ball projectile. 5) Squirt some lighter fluid into the can through the triangular puncture at the base. 6) Light a match and touch it to the puncture hole and FOOOOM! Out comes the ball at an impressively high velocity.
This endeavor always degenerates into a game of burning tennis ball soccer. The balls soak up lighter fluid nicely and continue to burn for a good long while. This game is played on a road with cars parked along it to serve as obstacles under which you do not want the flaming ball to go, but under which the flaming ball does eventually end up resulting in children running away screaming to hide. The car never seems to explode like on TV however.
---
www.smithtwins.com
In the future, busses will lift passengers up into the sky for no really good reason.
Here you can find some links. They are not all toy moding, some are toy destruction but you have between others:
How See 'n Says Work;
How to make a talking fish say what you want;
And of course Scientific analysis of the destruction of a toy Chibi Moon figure.
Yahh, hiii haaaaa! -Major Kong, from Dr. Strangelove
bottle rockets on 10 cent balsa wood gliders, then apply the old 20 gauge I had when I was a kid. Great sport, solved the problem of no one to throw a clay bird for you, plus, they would fly very erratically, extra bonus points for a correct aim, and if you missed, it was still good to go again..You had to have them on a ramp, shotgun in hand, bend,light, then only a few seconds to get a bead and blast it.
It was either that or blast locusts in the off-season.....
%^)
Slickest practical use for a toy I ever saw a friend of mine built. We used to pull cables for pro A/V and LAN installations. We tried any number of schemes to speed up the process of getting a light cord run first to drag the cable bundles in tricky dropped ceiling locations, without having to push up dozens of tiles and get all fiberglassed out and chip the things up.. First we tried a short casting rod, nope, that didn't work. then we tried a wrist rocket slingshot with the casting rod reel attached to it, shoot a rubber weight way down the ceiling tiles to the open one for a drop, the weight trailed a light monofilament line that was strong enough to snake the cables with. OK, but it still lacked great accuracy and hard to make it go around obstacles. Then, a stroke of genius. It was my idea, but he had the loot to pull it off. Went to ratshack, got the meanest rc all something drive they had, at the time was a bigfoot looking truck. That worked GREAT for hauling cables, as long as we could see it to steer it. Nowadays I guess you could put a cam with it and a headlight,and do some fancy long range cable hauling (if cables are still used now that is).
When I was 5-years-old, my aunt bought me one of those dorky remote control cars that goes forward except when you press the remote control, making it turn backwards and to the right.
Well, being bought at Big Lots, it breaks almost immedietely and leaves me with my first of many derelict cars.
My father, being an insane, genius, electrical engineer (do they make them any other way?), decides that the thing to do is make it into a complete remote control car. So the first things he does is orders a MOSFET speed control kit from RC/Modeler (back in the days when electric speed controls were awesome AND expensive). And he hands me a soldering iron, a schematic, a preprinted circuit board, and sets me to putting it all together.
Fast-forward one year: I'm playing with my brand new remote control car! It runs over anything and teaches me a very valuable lesson about things coming at you turning right when you move the stick left!
I've still got that car. 20 years later and it rolls just fine with a fresh NiCad charge. And I'm a mechanical engineer. Coincidence?
1. You
2. My mother
3. ???
4. Profit!
www.eissq.com/BandP.html Ball and Plate System. Amuse your friends. Crush your enemies.
There has been a spate of fish hacking (what else do you do with a Big Mouth Billy Bass after the five-minute period it can hold your interest?)
Recently I exhibited my seven-bass animatronic work called School of Fish Pain at the DC Museum of Contemporary Art. I used Audacity to edit the audio clips the fish say. The fish cry out and whap their tails in pain. It hurts to be dry.
I used infrared LED's and sensors as eyes. By pulsing the LED's and reading the sensors when both on and off, I was able to filter out background noise. When the truck approaches an obstacle it knows something is there and will swerve or stop and back up if the obstacle registers on both its left and right front. Like this, the truck can drive around continuously on its own. But not for long cause it sucks down batteries like you wouldn't believe, worse on plush carpet but not so much on hardwood flooring.
I've also modded a different RC monster to carry a wireless video+audio camera. It moves too fast to drive indoors. It is interesting to drive around the yard while sitting at my dining room table watching the monitor. I would like to add a radio circuit to carry my voice. Imagine the neighbors kids reaction if a little truck drives up to them and says 'Hey you little hooligans, get the heck out off my lawn!'
I can't believe this one remains so popular. I actually went through two of these due to the poor quality of the keypads. Once they were dead and gone, I went through about five or more years of withdrawls.
In retrospect, I suppose that toy was the start of my interest in robotics and AI, though I have yet to officially toy with anything beyond an A.L.I.C.E or eggy bot.
My problem is I also lack the attention span to be able to sit down and teach myself ICs, programming, you know, all that brainy nerdy stuff.
From what I remember of my BigTrak(s), I remember the plastic tires being pretty crappy, though the 'suspension' it had was pretty badass when it came to driving on pavement and the like. A set of rubber tires would have made it much more rugged and versatile.
Oh to be 7 again...
I've hooked up model rocket engines to cheap remote control cars a few times. Just use a car with turbo, a simple resistor and some ignitors and rocket engines. As an added bonus you can use the rocket engines that blow the parachute out to ignite a few M80's or something else creative.
I severely modded a gasoline powered golf cart into a robot back in the early 1980s. The first incarnation used four Apple II computers. I stripped all the mechanicals--brakes, steering, throttle, trans--and replaced them with DC motors. Everything was computerized.
/.?
Being a golf cart, it was big enough for two people. I added ultra-sonic detection, IR and various control systems for remote operation. I'm a radio ham so my first camera system for teleoperation used amateur TV on 440Mhz. Fun to drive remotely!
Teleoperation and autonomous roving is cool but the most fun is being *in* the vehicle and driving it via a camera system and laptop. It's a tremendous challenge be in a vehicle and to drive it around a course while looking at a computer screen. Much more difficult than any computer or vid game.
I've been 'playing' with the machine for years and finally figured out a way to make money with it: I turned it into a game. See robot pics here: http://aicommand.com/pictures.htm
My next venture is a total mod of my ultra-light and fly it from on the ground. See the pics and note the computer company name on the wings: http://www.aicommand.com/ultrlite.htm
Hello! Mr. Seed M. Investor, do you read
let's say you take an action figure, say something like a second-generation Gi Joe (small one) and you put a blow torch on his feet. Well. the plastic melt and ignites at the same time and flaming balls of plastic drip off. You don't want to get those on yourself, they will burn right through your skin, lickety-split, and leave a HOLE in you. The worst thing is, I have two friends, whom I did grow up with, who have scars for the same reason. Why did he need to burn?
Crushing my karma one post at a time.
I not the best with electronics(more of a programmer) but I took one of those Kung Fu Fighting singing hamsters and ripped out the electronics. Hooked up the motors to 20' of phone wire and a couple of switches. Plus I hooked up a junk speaker I had lying around.
The kids at a carnival loved having a hamster that could talk back to them.
You say things that offend me and I can deal with it. Can you?
Entry level hobby R/C cars had a mechanical speed control, you are correct. I have not seen one outside the hobby comunity, though. I also believe the post is BS, for the same reason.
...make a small lighter-than-air craft that's hefty enough to support a few solar cells, an electric motor with a propeller, the guts of a camera/cellphone/GPS unit, and a few wires and things, and rig it up so that you can call it up and direct it where to go and take pics or video. If you run it out of juice, just wait awhile for the cells to charge it back up while it drifts merrily along. If it loses cellphone coverage (which it shouldnt very often, being high in the sky), just wait for it to drift back into range of another tower. The biggest problem I have thought of is finding a way to contain the helium or hydrogen (oh the humanity!) without it leaking away, as it always seems to do even from those metal foil balloons.
Yeah, there's another thing that I'm never gonna do. And I'm aware that there's probably severe problems with the concept itself so go ahead and tell me why this would never work.
My blog can kick your blog's ass
Anyway, after buying a couple of those swords, (one for me and another for a friend, so we could have saber battles), I concluded that I didn't like the way the sound effects worked. So I spent a couple of days rebuilding. I took the sound-guts from another toy and rigged the saber so that there were now two extra buttons within easy reach of your finger; One, when pressed, would make a, 'deflected blaster bolt' sound, and another which made a nice, 'Waving the Saber' sound; --all over top the basic saber hum.
It worked really well, and I lucked out with the parts I had available and the way in which they were designed. All I needed was basic electronics knowledge to make it all work.
The finished product made shadow fighting very dramatic; you could now match up the sounds the saber made exactly with what you were doing with it. Very cool! Now the saber toy was something which was actually worth the twenty-five bucks or whatever I paid for it. --Strangely, I can't remember the last time a toy was made which included the sensible features any normal kid would want.
The plastic for the blade could have been made better. See-thru green, (it was Luke's saber from Jedi), wasn't the best choice. It should have been more opaque so that the light bulb could do its job in illuminating the blade. But whatever. --I also drew up designs which would allow for the blade to retract entirely into the hilt, (another stupid feature of the toy was the ten inches of exposed blade when it was retracted. Lame.) Making it work properly could be done if you dropped the battery size down to two AA's, but it would have required molding my own plastic parts, which I wasn't going to do.
There seems to be a law; "No Toy Is Allowed To Be Completely Cool. There Must Be Some Suckage Involved."
Ah well. Like most things in life, I had way more fun modding the thing than I would have if it had arrived perfectly realized into my hands from the package.
-FL
Is there a non-OO version for those of us who think OO is faddish hot air?
An old spring wound clock .. i made a spitwad shooter which I placed on the back shelf in the classroom for use when they were showing boring films (this was in the 5th grade..about 1955)
Diplomacy is the art of saying "Nice doggie" until you can find a rock. Will Rogers
the only mod i've ever done was to bolt some skateboard trucks to an old c64 that died. Worked a treat until someone jumped onto it and snapped the bugger in half...
I took one of those cheap helicopters that you start by pulling on a cord, and modded it to use a Dremel tool instead. :)
Pictures and video here: halr9000.com
it's not a defect.. it's a "feature"
When a passenger of the foot, hooves in sight, tootel the horn trumpet melodiously
I guess my first modding experience would fall under the "artsy-fartsy" catagory.
I realized that every conflict has its casualties.
I'd rip an arm off of a stormtrooper, then use red and pink modelling paint to make the injury look authentic.
My mother sat me down one day for a talk, because she found a bloody GI Joe head and a Stormtrooper arm in the bathtub.
---
At school, Lisa and all her friends play with their new Talking Malibu Stacy dolls.
Stacy: Let's buy makeup so the boys will like us.
Lisa: [sighs] Don't you people see anything wrong what Malibu Stacy says?
Celeste: There's something wrong with what _my_ Stacy says.
Stacy: [in a low voice] My spidey sense is tingling -- anybody call for a web-slinger?
Lisa: No, Celeste. I mean, the things she says are sexist.
Girls: [giggle] Lisa said a dirty word!
-- Ah, to be eight again, "Lisa vs. Malibu Stacy"
...have you heard about "The Horror of Blimps"? If not, I suggest you read it before you go building anything. Yah.
"Good news, everyone!"
I used to take apart my GI Joes. Remember that one phillips screw in their back? Well I would pretend that a Mad Scientist had swapped their body parts. I was the only kid on my block to have a demasked Ninja. In retrospect, I probly coulda made more of the Ninjas and sold them at school.
So whose head do you want on there? Deep 6 or Clutch?
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
I want plans.
No, really.
(I've got a few modded lightsabers and other crap, including ones into which the blade completely retracts. (Also, some extra bulbs, mounting hardware, lightsaber sound chips...)
My plans included some simple open circuits to be completed by grabbing the hilt at various points.
Raptor
"Procrastination is great. It gives me a lot more time to do things that I'm never going to do."
maybe that last bit is you
GrimRC
Maybe not quite on topic, but my brother has taken up a variety of digicams with small electric radio controlled planes and the videos are quite good. He's also experimented with wireless cameras to get live video as well. If you do this, don't buy the cheap junk off ebay though. Electric R/C is quite sophisticated nowadays. Some of those gear reduction motors can swing quite a large prop and the servos are smaller than ever.
-- After all is said and done, more is said than done.
As an art project for Michael Rodemer's Art 454 class at the University of Michigan, I 'hacked' the Barbie Super Talking pager using a PIC chip and an ISD sound chip. The original toy did not function as a real pager; rather, you clipped it on a little belt that came with it, pushed a button and walked nonchalantly into a room, presumably where grown-ups were. After a few seconds, it would beep! Oh my, you're someone important! You got a voice page from Barbie! She wants to call Ken and go to the movies! Seriously, I was like, "What the FUCK are we teaching these kids?!" So I modified it. I re-etched a new circuit board to support the PIC/ISD chips and re-mounted it back inside. Basically, I just wanted Barbie to give more realistic messages to her fans... the prototype worked great, though the case got a little damaged in the process. People seemed to get a pretty big kick out of it. Then it got ripped off. Anyway, the sound files are all online at: http://www.unithom.com/misc/barbie/. I think the PIC source is pretty old and full of bugs, not the most recent one, but the WAV files are worth a listen. :) I ended up buying two of these things so some day I may re-do the hack a little more cleanly -- and keep a closer eye on the toy this time, when it's done.
IANAL, however I see this claim made about the Teddy Ruxpin cases (Worlds of Wonder v. Veritel Learning Systems & Worlds of Wonder v. Vector Int'l) on numerous web sites.
The key phrase here is "toy bear with unique voice". The unauthorized derivative works were being marketed as new Teddy Ruxpin stories, and used a similar-sounding voice actor and custom recorded data channel to capitalize on the original (copyrighted) Teddy Ruxpin "Look and Feel", the "ruxpin experience" which the children expected.
If you were to attempt to market a Ruxpin-compatible tape which caused Teddy's eyes to roll back in his head and intone a backwards-masked satanic mass recorded by Iron Maiden (One of the few groups to intentionally backmask on a metal album), you might be able to prevail against Worlds of Wonder.
OTOH, the market for black mass teddy ruxpin tapes is (hopefully) rather small.
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
I'm afraid that's not going to happen. --I gave the saber away as a birthday gift and all the electronics were done on the fly. The only plans I drew up were for a fully retractable blade toy and are now long gone, and basically involved a sort of "If I were a Toy Company" day dream plan which started the toy design from the ground up.
What I do remember, though, was that the item I got the new sound guts from was another extend-a-blade sword rip off toy which came from Asia. I found it at a dollar store several months before the official Star Wars sabers were released, (and which it is entirely possible were ripped off from the Asian non-licensed design.)
The Asian toy, in typical dollar store cheesiness, had the face of a robot warrior imprinted on the hilt, with three buttons forming eyes and a mouth. One turned the blade on and off, one made a series of explosion sounds, and another sounded like a laser bolt shooting. I only used the second one and had it rigged to cut out when the button was released.
The re-wiring was done in that insane haze of creative hacker-lust which comes along when you realize something Must Be Done At Once! (You probably know what I'm talking about.)
In other words. .
You're on your own. Good luck, though! --If I still had the drive, I think I'd blow a few hundred trying to rig a cool sound-sword with some of those really cool expensive milled sabers which use glowing blades.
I keep pondering ways to make an extending blade using light emitting polymers. . . Nobody's done that yet to my satisfaction, though there has been one noble effort which involves varying voltage to the glowing tape used on one version of a blade.
I also suspect that it might be very possible to make a sword which creates a true bio-feedback 'saber wave' sound using small magnets on a rubber band along with old mouse parts to detect degrees of motion, coupled up with the sound guts from one of those new cell phones which have such amazing speaker technology, (and which are also programable!)
Ah well. A project for another day.
-FL
cheers to that.
GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
Thanks for setting me straight, it's a relief to know that the world is slightly less insane than I thought. :-)
"Boy's Life", the American Boy Scouting magazine for kids, had plans in the 80's for turning a Big Trak into a R/C robot, called GISMO 2BL.
w ww.boyslife.org/archives/2002/04/gismo.html
More info here:
http://web.archive.org/web/20021024062446/
I'v e acquired scans of almost all GISMO plans and will upload them (when I get permission) to some website for nostalgic Scouts and ex-Scouts.
Mechanical speed controls are very cheap, but they are also very unreliable. They are prone to arcing, and fouling themselves up in short order. I race R/C cars (but only have a lousy tire sponsorship) and have never seen a mechanical speed control outside the hobby community.
Someone shows me one, I'll believe it, until then I am a doubting Thomas.
There needs to be a "Disturbing" moderator.
Though that POS trailer never worked well. I think my parents threw it out though (I had the boxes and everything).