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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?"
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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The making of the Falcon...
This guy put a PC in a Falcon... kinda cool.
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).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.
"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 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."
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
I wanted one too, really bad, for Xmas. After opening all my presents, no Big Trak :(. As soon as the stores all opened up after Xmas, I took all my Xmas money and went to Toys R Us and bought one. The whole family watched me navigate an obstacle course in the kitchen, my uncle mumbled something about microprocessor. I think it was soon after that I got an Apple ][e for my birthday. Thanks Dad!
I still have it (the bigtrak, the ][e died), and believe it or not, it's not in a closet or the garage, it's on a shelf in the living room. Damnit, now I have to go find a nine volt!!!
(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 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 :-)
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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 :)
Yeah, it's like a mini-DARPA grand challenge. It just needs to drive itself around campus. It's certainly a lot cheaper than the real thing.
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.
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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.
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In the future, busses will lift passengers up into the sky for no really good reason.
So you didn't have to dead-reckon track distance from motor runtime; instead you debounced the photocell output and counted gear teeth passing. You could and did still get screwed by various amounts of slip between the track and the floor, but variable motor speed wasn't as much of an issue.
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'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.
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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
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If a battery contains liquids, as the battery provides charge, the concentrations of these reactants change over time. The change of these concentrations cause the voltage of the battery to drop over time. This is the case with your average consumer battery -- items are in solution, so concentrations change over time. And then the voltage drops. Hence, your motor receives a different voltage, and may provide less movement for the same amount of time being activated.
Quite right. But you would know better than I would. However, I was a little disappointed you didn't provide another suggestion. Are accelerometers a good way of actually measuring movement? Would you recommend, perhaps placing a rigid shaft on the ground, rotating about that, and having coded marking on that shaft to indicate movement? Myself, all I know is that a shaft encoder greatly improves performance relative to no correction mechanism.
You like splinters in your crotch? -Jon Caldara
Ah, Now I understand. This is an over simplification. A cell voltage will decrease as it becomes discharged. However, if this were the reason motors did not get the same ammout of power at time A as they did at time B then it could be easily fixed with electronics.
A battery can be moddled as voltage source with an internal resistance in series. As a battery discharges this resistance increses.
While this is not 100% accurate (As cell voltage does change too.) It models the important fact that A cells capacity to provide current decreases with time and while a cells voltage may go from 1.2v (full) to 1.0v (dead) (for NiCad) the internal resistance will change much more dramatically over the life span of the battery.
The reason I did not say what can be done is that it is very hard to do. Typically what is done is there is some other system on board that tells the robot where to go. For example, you may have a couple of photocells "looking" for a light source or a vision system. These systems provide feed back that does not say "turn 90 deg" but rather "keep turning your not there yet".
MEMS accelerometers are not very good for measuring change in distance. The output is at best +/- 1mg which does not sound so bad but when you have to take the double integral to got position you'll soon realize that error accumulates very fast. Your latter suggestion would probably work well but would be a pain to implement. I don't think I've seen many people do what you suggest.
One thing I have seen work relatively well is hacking two optical mice to watch the floor. Two are needed to detect rotation as well as displacement.
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
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
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.