Slashdot Mirror
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
- 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).If by modding you mean, "blow it up with firecrackers to see what it does."
Laboratree - Scientific collaboration based on OpenSocial.
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'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.
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