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Wow! Nice trip down memory lane. I was one of the three Electrical engineers on Barney (and the ActiMates product line). The three of us divided up the system
by Zeetah 3y ago
Wow! Nice trip down memory lane.
I was one of the three Electrical engineers on Barney (and the ActiMates product line). The three of us divided up the system design, radio and radio protocol design, PCB layout, and a bunch of other items. We spent a few weeks bringing up the factory in China.
I wrote the firmware for Barney, including the radio code and Co-designed the engine used for interactivity. It has a nice design in that the engine could be reused for other products.
I designed the protocol between the main MCU, and the voice chip, and wrote all the code for the voice chip.
I remember the Xerox work and was quite pleased that they weren't successful in getting it to say arbitrary things. The folks that own these properties are rightfully quite vested in the characters not saying or doing things they didn't authorize.
- qingcharles 3y agoAny Easter eggs in that firmware? :)
- Zeetah 3y agoNot Barney. In Arthur and DW, on my birthday, of you press the correct sensor sequence, they will sing me happy birthday. On Teletubbies, there is an Easter egg that I think scrolls the developers names but it has been too long i.e. I know there is an Easter egg but I not 100% sure about the message.
- soylentcola 3y agoAh...my little step-brother had the Arthur one. "Hey hey, it's time to play!" every morning.... I was around high-school-senior age and remember thinking how cool it was to have toys with even some semblance of "smarts" in them. Of course it was mostly a few preprogrammed routines and a nice chunk of stored audio with the daily "fun facts", but still way cooler than the old Teddy Ruxpin. I bet they'd be cool to hack around on. Nowadays they'd be tied to some mobile phone app/account and end up on the HN front page when someone finds the database of recorded audio and video on an unsecured server somewhere.
- vel0city 3y agoI was just old enough to be on the older end to appreciate this toy and to really dig the neat tech tricks it was pulling off. Thanks for making this cool toy. I always wondered what signaling the TV transmitter was looking for in the video stream. Was it extra data in the closed captioning area?
- vitovito 3y agoThis looks like the relevant patent for it: https://patents.google.com/patent/US6281939B1/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US6281939B1/en "Method and apparatus for decoding data encoded in the horizontal overscan portion of a video signal"
- Zeetah 3y agoGood job finding it. The patient calls out two other key patents. It also describes how the data is encoded.