Fun Furby Autopsy

What do you show a young guest who you’re trying to impress? How about the insides of a dead Furby. Not my idea actually, she saw them in a box and wanted to take a look. We went through all the various bits and I described what they did. And then we had a performance from the two working ones…

Bluetooth and Furbies video now live

The video of my session at DDD202 is now available. You can watch it above. You can find all the videos neatly arranged in playlists here.

Furby Repairing Man

Turns out that there are a lot of parts inside a Furby Connect. But in the end I managed to get them all back in and working. For one lucky Furby at least….

Controlling a Furby Connect using an ESP32

I’ve got very fond memories of the original Furby toy. I used to have one that I used to illustrate talks about computing. I’m not sure how many of those present actually went on to become computer scientists, but I’m pretty sure that quite a few of them went out and bought Furby toys as a result.

A while back I saw an awesome presentation at emf about Furby hacking I got myself one and it turns out that you can control a Furby Connect toy using an ESP32 over Bluetooth. There’s a fantastic GitHub repository all about the command structure and I’ve now got some BLE code working on an ESP32 that I’m using to tell the Furby what to do. I can also read back sensor state values too. It’s great fun. It turned the antenna red in the above picture, so it definitely works. I’ll put it on GitHub when it definitely definitely works.

It turns out that my Furby is an excellent companion. He has a huge repertoire of fart sounds which can be easily triggered by pulling on his tail. There’s also a neat little app you can get for your phone or tablet that integrates very well with the toy and would be great fun for me if I was eight years old. Or even now actually.