Teddy Ruxpin modifications

[lachlant1984]

Hi everyone. I had an interesting idea recently, some of you may be familiar with the process of circuit bending, taking a device, usually a kid's toy like Speak And Spell or a toy keyboard and modifying it to make all kinds of sounds. I personally don't like circuit bending very much at all, and it worries me that people are buying up products like Speak And Spell for the purpose of modifying them, these are usually products that aren't made anymore so there's a shrinking finite supply of them, but I've thought of a pretty interesting idea for a Teddy Ruxpin modification. Sometimes people modify products in other ways like taking an electronic device and putting it inside the housing of another electronic device, for example, people taking a standard desktop PC and cramming it into a Nintendo Entertainment System case, the YouTube user lukemorse1 once took an NEC PC Engine and installed it into the casing for a Nintendo Famicom Disk System disk drive, that's the kind of thing I'm talking about. Here's my idea, take a non working Teddy Ruxpin and remove the cassette player, then take the circuit board from a small portable radio and install it into Teddy Ruxpin, wire up the volume control and on/off switch on the back of Teddy Ruxpin so that the power switch and volume control operate the radio. Connect the audio output from the radio to Teddy Ruxpin's internal speaker, install the radio so that the tuning control and AM/FM Switch are operated by the rotating spindles where the tape sprockets normally sit and you've got a Teddy Ruxpin radio. What do the rest of you out there think? I'd kind of like to see it done, and of course the radio should be powered by the 4 C cell batteries normally used by Teddy Ruxpin if that can be managed, and perhaps the connector port could be converted into an FM antenna jack or headphone output or AC Adaptor socket.

[retrobear]

I've always wanted a teddy bear that could play the radio, but I don't think I'd want anyone modifying one of my Teddy Ruxpins to do it. It would be cool to see, though.

[lachlant1984]

I think RadioShack had a teddy bear radio back in the 90's, I seem to remember playing with one at Tandy once, the volume control, tuning knob and AM/FM switch were on the bear's chest and the bear was really small, it was made of a soft fur, but I don't know how huggable it was because of the hard plastic controls on the front. I also remember that a friend of mine had a toy dog of sorts that had an AM radio in it, I think RadioShack made a Snoopy radio as well in the early 90's, but I'm not sure if they were available here, I've just seen them on the RadioShack catalogues website at www.radioshackcatalogs.com, I believe that's the web address.

[Deleted]

I've been thinking about this for a while: You know, it would probably be possible to fit a Raspberry Pi $25/$35 single-board computer into a non-working Teddy Ruxpin with relatively little difficulty. After all, it's ARM-based and therefore needs no cooling at all.

Sure, you might have to drill some holes in the plastic to let out the cables for the requisite HDMI or composite cables, power cable, and USB hub, but it'd be hands-down the neatest computer case in the world. ;D

If done with an irreparable Teddy II, you could probably avoid the drilling by mounting the board in place of the original electronics and just running the cables out through the tape deck hole, which isn't covered in this model.

If you went the Teddy II route, you could even replace the servo with a modern one, add new electronics for interfacing between the computer and the motor, and do something like this guy did (there's a video demonstration here; BEWARE: Has scenes of Teddy II brutality!). That would make an already-awesome computer case even more awesome!

[retrobear]

There's no audio on that vid except for the techno music, so I have no clue what's going on. I wanted to hear how he's got his Teddy talking. The only bad thing is that it would be really weird to hear a computer voice coming out of Teddy rather than the awesomeness that is Phil Baron.

[Deleted]

He just shows a condensed run-down of how he replaced the motor and added some extra ones so that the neck and arms also move, as well as showing how pressing a key on his keyboard opens the mouth and moves the eyes. It's just a showcase of the instructions that I linked to before it, and he doesn't have Teddy talking at all, so you're not really missing too much, there (and the neck and arm movement, whilst interesting from a technical standpoint, both look a tiny bit creepy to me, to be honest).

[lachlant1984]

Hmm, I'm sure you could write some software on one of those computers you speak of that would interface with the motors in the original Teddy Ruxpin that would allow you to do some pretty cool animation tricks, you could make it fully self-contained so you wouldn't need to hook Teddy Ruxpin up to anything and therefore possibly avoid drilling any holes in the plastic, I'm thinking of a mod that would involve installing an SD card reader in place of the cassette player and writing some software that would allow Teddy Ruxpin to play MP3 audio files with animation coding for the eyes and mouth. I'm not capable of doing this myself, but that's a great idea of putting one of those computer things into a Teddy Ruxpin.

[retrobear]

That would be kind of cool. I don't think I'd be brave enough to try it on my Teddies.

[Deleted]

Me either Id be too afraid to try that on any of my Teddy Ruxpins