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Toys Robotics Hardware

Old Toy Modding? 191

Posted by timothy from the hello-kittty dept.
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?"
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Old Toy Modding? More

Old Toy Modding?

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  • AWESOME !!!! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by MajorDick ( 735308 ) on Sunday June 06, 2004 @03:32PM (#9351926)
    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 :)

    • Re:AWESOME !!!! (Score:4, Interesting)

      by mikael ( 484 ) on Sunday June 06, 2004 @03:49PM (#9352030)
      I actually built my first robot using parts from a BigTrak, it was much like a Hero and I used a modified Armitron
      I remember seeing the BigTrak advertised in Byte/ Personal Computer World back in the 1980's. I always thought that would be fun to program, but it was just too expensive.

      Instead, the first programmable toy I had was a lego robot crane that was programmed using those 4x1 racks bricks driving 8 tooth gears, which were all placed on a 8x20 flat panel. A motor drove the tray through the inside of the machine. The moving racks then made the different gears turn, which could make the robot arm rotate, turn the arm and raise/lower the crane hook. The only limit to what could be done was a shortage of those rack pieces.
      • That sounds damn cool! Kinda like Lego punchcards, almost.

        I'm going to have to thing about that one; perhaps I could recreate a punchcard machine......
        • The instructions for building the crane came from the Technica Ideas book 8888 [isodomos.com], which extended the options of the original technica models [isodomos.com]. And I also made the mechanical dog, which was technically impressive to me, but absolutely hilarious to everyone else, since all four legs were moved by hand rotating the poor mutts tail!

    • Took mine apart (Score:3, Insightful)

      by The Tyro ( 247333 )
      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 in
      • I forgot about the laser, I also had the Dump truck trailer that plugged into what looked like an Audio Plug at the top rear of the BigTrak , that actuator sequence is what I used to raise it "tray"

      • Re:Took mine apart (Score:5, Informative)

        by OldMiner ( 589872 ) on Sunday June 06, 2004 @04:42PM (#9352309) Journal
        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.

        This is a running problem with most batteries when operating a motor. Unless the battery is entirely solid state and doesn't decay over time, the voltage it supplies drops as it gets used up. Problem continues to exist today with Lego Mindstorm [lego.com] robots as well. To correct for this, one would want to put a sensor which senses the rotating shaft on the motor -- keep rotating motor until it's gone through the proper amount of degrees instead of just supplying driving voltage for about the right amount of time.

        • Re:Took mine apart (Score:2, Interesting)

          by dha ( 23395 )

          robots as well. To correct for this, one would want to put a sensor which senses the rotating shaft on the motor -- keep rotating motor until it's gone through the proper amount of degrees instead of just

          Well, it's possible that this was a non-standard add-on done before I got to it, but when we hacked on a big trak as a summer hardware project in school, that one at least had photocells looking through the teeth on the track drive gears.

          So you didn't have to dead-reckon track distance from motor runt

        • Re:Took mine apart (Score:2, Informative)

          by mogrinz ( 548098 )
          Actually, the Big Trak was a little smarter than this (I took mine apart also). On the inside of each wheel was a disc with evenly spaced holes. On one side of the disk was a fixed IR emitter. On the other side, a detector. When the Big Trak turned, out could "count" the times the hole lined up between the emitter and receiver and therefore know the wheel had gone a fixed distance. Even if there was some slippage, mine was largely accurate. I remember many times sending it across the room and back. The big

  • Oh, the toys you will mod... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Flounder ( 42112 ) * on Sunday June 06, 2004 @03:33PM (#9351928)
    Furbys, Speak and Spells, and Teddy Ruxpins, oh my!

    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.

  • Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Sunday June 06, 2004 @03:33PM (#9351935)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re:meccano (Score:2, Interesting)

      by kfg ( 145172 )
      I've always fancied making a copy of Harrison's H.1 clock. Harrison's were probably the most accurate clocks ever made until Reifler which is a championship reign of about 150 years.

      I wouldn't need a Meccano set though.

      I'd need a lumberyard.

      And several "spare" years.

      KFG

    • Re:meccano (Score:4, Informative)

      by fewl ( 133959 ) on Sunday June 06, 2004 @08:49PM (#9353489)
      well, a quick google found this:
      http://users.actcom.co.il/meccano/riefler_c lock.ht m

      the main site:
      http://users.actcom.co.il/meccano/

      They have examples of a bunch of meccano clocks and other devices.

  • Lifesize Barbie Doll.... (Score:5, Funny)

    by MonkeyBot ( 545313 ) on Sunday June 06, 2004 @03:33PM (#9351936)
    Well, you all probably don't want to hear what I...I mean my friend...did to a lifesize barbie doll.

  • I did some old toy modding... (Score:5, Funny)

    by AvantLegion ( 595806 ) on Sunday June 06, 2004 @03:36PM (#9351949) Journal
    I modded some old G.I. Joe toys with AI chips, but they started tearing up the house looking for "Gorgonites", and they jacked me and the cute neighbor girl up real good.

  • Millenium Falcon with a PC (Score:5, Interesting)

    by mmca ( 180858 ) on Sunday June 06, 2004 @03:36PM (#9351953) Homepage
    The making of the Falcon... [xkill.net]
    This guy put a PC in a Falcon... kinda cool.

  • I had one of those (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ksheff ( 2406 ) * on Sunday June 06, 2004 @03:37PM (#9351960) Homepage

    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.

    • Re:I had one of those (Score:5, Funny)

      by MajorDick ( 735308 ) on Sunday June 06, 2004 @04:23PM (#9352181)
      Yeah we had one of those old old teachers, we finally drove her to retire, I could never figure it out though we musta put 100 tacks on her chair at different times EVERY time they were bent, we used to say she had lead brithces )I know lead is soft but cmon we were in second grade) , Finally I got a serious whaching when I mixed ink from a pen, nasal spray and original crazy glue together and painted a matchbox car with it , while it was drying we were pushing it back and forth accross the desk by the bumper and she walked over and grabbed it, went to throw it in the trash and it was major league stick to her hand, she ended up with a bandage on her hand and I got my first "whacking" at the pincipals office, NOW THAT WAS TOY MODDING FOR FUN AND PROFIT !

  • Yes, that's a rocket in my pocket (Score:5, Interesting)

    by DynaSoar ( 714234 ) * on Sunday June 06, 2004 @03:39PM (#9351969) Journal
    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.

  • Robot R/C Car (Score:5, Interesting)

    by awkScooby ( 741257 ) on Sunday June 06, 2004 @03:39PM (#9351971)
    I'm working on getting an R/C car (with the R/C stuff removed) integrated with a sonar ring and a GPS. Currently the microcontroller is a 68HC11 (MIT 6.270 board), but I'm going to be switching to a mini-ITX board and a couple of PIC controllers connected via I2C. The basic idea for the bot is to let a user select a destination on campus (click on a map in a web page or something) and the robot will:
    1. Use GPS to determine where it currently is
    2. Do an A* Search to plan a path to the destination
    3. Use GPS for navigation
    4. 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!

    • Got one too (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Midnight Ryder ( 116189 )

      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 bore

  • Nintendo R.O.B. (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Useless for pretty much anything until I turned it into a pan/tilt webcam mount [macetech.com].

  • Heh (Score:5, Funny)

    by PrvtBurrito ( 557287 ) on Sunday June 06, 2004 @03:48PM (#9352022)
    If by modding you mean, "blow it up with firecrackers to see what it does."

    • "fireworks" mod (Score:4, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 06, 2004 @04:03PM (#9352096)
      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.

    • Re:Heh (Score:3, Funny)

      by mikael ( 484 )
      That sounds like a "PlaySchool" project I saw on Childrens TV. "And today children, we're going to make a model rocket. You'll need an old Pringles can, a plastic straw, some pieces of cork, a couple of balloons, orange or lemon juice and some baking soda..."
      ...
      "...Now, the pressure inside the Pringles can should increase from the mixing of the orange juice and the baking soda, and eventually push the cork out from the lid. If you're rocket doesn't take off within a few minutes, then stay well away, as so

  • Welllll (Score:5, Funny)

    by multiplexo ( 27356 ) on Sunday June 06, 2004 @03:53PM (#9352045) Journal
    I was wondering if anyone else had a good story about a retrofitted toy that they beefed up?
    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.

  • Bio-Bugs... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Cyno01 ( 573917 ) <Cyno01@hotmail.com> on Sunday June 06, 2004 @03:56PM (#9352061) Homepage
    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.

  • Washing Machine anyone? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Bart ( 12323 ) on Sunday June 06, 2004 @03:58PM (#9352077) Homepage
    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

  • OOPic is a great platform (Score:4, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 06, 2004 @04:08PM (#9352114)
    A real problem with microcontrollers is "where to start".

    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.

    • Re:OOPic is a great platform (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      or shell out some big bucks for development environment.

      Not true. Xilinx (one of the programmable hardware giants), has a free non-commercial environment for use. Also, their hardware is far superior to pics and the like. Some of their uC's have 400,000+ gates and up to 140 user addressable I/Os.

      You'll need to be able to code in Verilog, HDL, or ABLE for this to work. You could also just use the schematic editor that's included in the environment.

      In my mind (and probably all engineers), HDL is far more
      • I like xilinx stuff. I know a guy who built a simple processor using one of their FPGAs, as well as a video card. Using a few more chips, it was possible to actually boot and write some simple software on the setup.
      • Xilinx (one of the programmable hardware giants), has a free non-commercial environment for use

        Did you happen to look at how much the hardware costs? The cheapest development board I can find on that site (just the board, no FPGA) runs >$500!

        Compare with a full OOpic dev kit at $100.
    • Bah ,

      16F84's or it's 28 and 40 pin cousins or 68hc11's are easy to program all the C programming tools are free and the programmers for them are also pretty much free... $15.00 if you really HAVE to buy one.

      the 68hc11's are high power embedded processors compared tothe Microchip pic's and have been around forever and is the staple procesor for most robot building clubs out there.

      I suggest you look at processors that have a huge follwing online. you can get all the development stuff for 100% free and ge
      • Yep,

        I use the 16F871s which are cheap (2.50 ukp each, less in bulk - which is good, as I tend to blow them up quite often) and built my own programmer using the instructions at http://www.emicros.com/2bit_article.htm [emicros.com]

        The highest cost was the ZIF socket, other than that it's just a few resistors and transistors. The Assembler development environment is free from the manufacturer (www.microchip.com).
      • "Atmel cpu's should be avoided... Atmel is pretty much hostile towards casual/hobbiest users"

        Not true.

        Atmel does pay for hosting of AVRFREAKS.net an AVR enthusists web site that is great for getting started with this type of uC. Many of their engineers also frequent the site. Not only that but in my experience AVRs are a much better platform to work with than pics and HC11.

        Better yet, there is a GCC port for the AVR based controllers that works well in both windows, and unix. Best of all it's free

  • Nintendo hack (Score:3, Interesting)

    by SlayerDave ( 555409 ) <elddm1@gmaiMOSCOWl.com minus city> on Sunday June 06, 2004 @04:12PM (#9352130) Homepage
    When I was about 10, I had a portable black and white TV that would run on batteries. I figured that if the TV would run on batteries, there was no reason why a Nintendo wouldn't also. So I figured out the voltage that the Nintendo power supply drew and I taped together enough D-cell batteries to generate that voltage. I hooked the batteries up to the prongs on the adapter and surprisingly enough, it worked! Of course it drained the batteries rapidly, but who cares? I had a battery-powered Nintendo!

    (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)

  • My old toys.. (Score:3, Funny)

    by suso ( 153703 ) on Sunday June 06, 2004 @04:13PM (#9352136) Journal
    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 [profquotes.com]
  • 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. :'(

  • LEGO Modding (Score:3, Interesting)

    by thygrrr ( 765730 ) on Sunday June 06, 2004 @04:30PM (#9352228)
    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 :)

  • Nerf Modding (Score:2, Interesting)

    by JawnV6 ( 785762 )
    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.

  • Tomy Omni Jnr + C64 (Score:5, Interesting)

    by cybergibbons ( 554352 ) on Sunday June 06, 2004 @04:55PM (#9352391) Homepage
    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.

  • R/C car modding (Score:5, Interesting)

    by digidave ( 259925 ) on Sunday June 06, 2004 @04:57PM (#9352403)
    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.

  • Culture jam Gi-Joe/Barbie (Score:4, Funny)

    by dmaxwell ( 43234 ) on Sunday June 06, 2004 @05:07PM (#9352449)
    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.

  • Lots of mods, none documented.... (Score:3, Informative)

    by stienman ( 51024 ) <adavis&ubasics,com> on Sunday June 06, 2004 @05:27PM (#9352550) Homepage Journal
    PORK! [techweb.com]

    -Adam

  • Tennis Ball Cannon (Score:5, Interesting)

    by shockbeton ( 669384 ) <leadholder@dennis.gmail@com> on Sunday June 06, 2004 @05:29PM (#9352565) Homepage
    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 (Score:4, Informative)

    by ArcticCelt ( 660351 ) on Sunday June 06, 2004 @05:36PM (#9352596)
    Here you can find some links. [reversetools.org] 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.

  • R/C Car hacking (Score:5, Funny)

    by otter42 ( 190544 ) on Sunday June 06, 2004 @05:38PM (#9352605) Homepage Journal
    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!
    • we used to attach model rocket engines to R/C cars.

      Ingredients:

      1 Team Associated RC/10 buggy sans motor and tranny (so it free-wheels)
      1 custom PVC rocket mount
      1 50N model rocket engine. (like, F or G class in Estes terms. Huge.)
      1 piece of cannon fuse
      1 source of fire for fuse
      1 large, flat, non-flammable place. (Miles Square park in Orange County CA, if you must know. They have a huge slab of tarmac that people use for RC cars, rockets, etc.)

      When the engine went off it was like... uh, it was like a rocket.
    • Sorry, but I'm going to call bullshit.

      All the old R/C cars of the "run forward, press a button and run backward and turn" didn't have a real steering mechanism. Sometimes, you'd get one that was fairly sophisticated, and the front wheels would actually turn, but usually, this was accomplished by a idler wheel located under the chassis between the front wheels. The front wheels didn't actually touch the ground.

      When you allowed the car to run forward, the rear wheels spun forward and the front wheel "lo

  • Fish Hacking (Score:3, Interesting)

    by TheSync ( 5291 ) on Sunday June 06, 2004 @06:05PM (#9352734) Journal
    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 [thesync.com] at the DC Museum of Contemporary Art [mocadc.org]. I used Audacity [sourceforge.org] to edit the audio clips the fish say. The fish cry out and whap their tails in pain. It hurts to be dry.

  • I modded an R/C Monster Truck with an OOPic (Score:4, Funny)

    by Radical Rad ( 138892 ) on Sunday June 06, 2004 @06:28PM (#9352839) Homepage
    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 st

  • Rocket powered (Score:2, Interesting)

    by 6D65 ( 786032 )
    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.

  • Modding of big boy toys... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by guru312 ( 200260 ) on Sunday June 06, 2004 @07:54PM (#9353233)
    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 /.?

  • 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.

  • Took one of those extending blade light sabers... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Fantastic Lad ( 198284 ) on Sunday June 06, 2004 @11:41PM (#9354163)
    When they first came out, they were pretty darned exciting. Phantom Mucus hadn't been released yet, so, Star Wars was still cool.

    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 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.
      • I want plans.

        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 a

  • Modded toy helicopter (Score:2, Interesting)

    by halr9000 ( 465474 )

    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 [halr9000.com]

  • 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.

  • Toy mods (Score:2, Funny)

    by g0bshiTe ( 596213 )
    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?
  • 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!

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