11 ms·

Error Handling in Baby Toys

169 points by dave-x 3y ago

monocasa 3y ago
Kind of reminds me of Gray code, who's whole shtick is being a sequence which only changes one bit at a time. If you see two bits change you know it's an error condition and can handle that explicitly. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gray_code https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gray_code
- robryk 3y ago
  Or just a very quick change?
  - monocasa 3y ago
    With a Gray code you typically try to oversample to where it's either not an option to change that quickly, or represents an error in its own right if it does.
bombcar 3y ago
Once you recognize this you see it all over the place in kids toys. The current "toy record player" for example uses this - the "grooves" in the disk are just to press the switches in the "arm". This one: https://www.walmart.com/ip/Fisher-Price-Classics-Record-Player/33359799 https://www.walmart.com/ip/Fisher-Price-Classics-Record-Play... (the old 1978 one was just an actual "record" player).
- petsfed 3y ago
  I have one of the old ones. The head is actually a music-box style mechanical movement, with each "track" of the record corresponding to a particular tone. A standard music box has the notes of each tone embossed on a cylinder, or has pins installed at the location of the notes. As the cylinder rotates, the lands (that is, the raise part) of the embossing hits or plucks the strings/wires of the musical part. With the fisher-price toy, instead of a cylinder, its a disk. I've been meaning to figure out how to spec out an appropriate torsion spring to replace the one in mine, as all of the songs sound a bit slow these days. I'd also love to write a program to convert some songs from midi into a 3d-printable file to make my own records for it. I had no idea its from 1978, although that tracks with how old my siblings would've been when they got it.
  - bombcar 3y ago
    It was made for quite awhile; they show up on eBay and thrift stores quite often. I actually have a half-dead one, but I'm probably never going to actually fix it.
  - seabass-labrax 3y ago
    Such embossed discs were quite common in the late 19th century for various music boxes and orchestrions. It seems like they then went out of fashion in favour of paper rolls, presumably due to the increased playing time that could fit on a roll. Then of course the gramophone record was invented, so back to discs... Enter audio cassette tapes: miniature rolls. CDs. Are we in fact stuck in an eternal cycle? Where are my optical tapes?!
- buildsjets 3y ago
  They offered both the music-box model and the actual record player model back in the '70s. Source: I was there, and had both of them. I still have the actual record player, and a VERY beat up copy of "Mickey Mouse Disco"
  - petsfed 3y ago
    That is amazing, and also kind of a durability nightmare. I wonder how they designed the needle assembly to withstand the rigors of 6-year-old operators. I must've been 12 or so before my parents would let me even touch the record player on their stereo. Not without reason, to be sure: the stereo's 8-track player had been irretrievably broken before I was born when one of my siblings decided that it looked hungry and fed it a peanut butter sandwich.
    - bombcar 3y ago
      Record player needles are surprisingly durable if you don't really care terribly much about fidelity. And the most common issue can be solved by bending it back down so it rides the groove again.
cancerhacker 3y ago
The toy emitting "ut oh" on invalid input reminded me of a phonics toy - I think it was either a schoolbus or caterpillar, where phonemes could be pressed and it would sound them out "g-oo-d" "d-aw-g" - but if as a bored parent you tried "sh-ih-t" or similar it would emit "sh-<heeheehee>" I always wondered if it was localized per-market.
- bombcar 3y ago
  This was likely in response to things like the famous phone incident - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ebv51QNm2Bk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ebv51QNm2Bk If you were the guy coding one of those, and you saw that, I could easily imagine putting in a special case, just for fun. The aha, I could fix that we often feel.
  - Dwedit 3y ago
    There was an infamous case of some obscure Macintosh educational software that had a feature where it would read back text that you typed in. It even included a swear filter to prevent it from saying bad words. However, there was also a race condition/out of bounds memory read issue that caused it to stop reading the text you typed in, and instead start reading words directly from the swear list. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZQmL-PKr8Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZQmL-PKr8Y
    - glitchc 3y ago
      Bonus points to you!
- Cerium 3y ago
  As an opposite experience I bought my daughter a dump truck at Costco and got a good laugh out of it - it has a bunch of phrases, many are common. One very uncommon one is "Wow, that was a big dump!".
  - compootr 3y ago
    reminds me of the better call saul toilet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dR1m29cNVsc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dR1m29cNVsc
aaronax 3y ago
I also recently analyzed the binary encoding of a baby toy. https://aaron.axvigs.com/content/leapfrog-fridge-phonics-decoded https://aaron.axvigs.com/content/leapfrog-fridge-phonics-dec...
- malingo 3y ago
  Ha I did the same thing after that apple was on our fridge a few days. I wondered "how does it know which letter tile is inserted?" Looked at the back of a couple of the tiles, sure enough, binary. Good catch on the ASCII values!
benkuykendall 3y ago
I couldn't really understand this paragraph. Maybe I need a worked example? > Bit rotation can be implemented using a combination of bit shifting and or operations, and on a hardware level, with different locical XOR ports. That’s of course just one way, and you still need a way to identify the number without confusing it with another figure. Although I don’t think that last was implemented: if you select your starting bits in a smart way, there won’t be any overlap. The identification system here uses 14 bits, and all of the figures have either 6 or 7 1s, making it even possible to completely ignore bit rotation and just rely on the relative position of the enabled bits to do the identification. I’m of course merely guessing at this point. Not sure what it means to "completely ignore bit rotation" and "just rely on the relative position of the enabled bits", those sound like the same thing to me. To throw my speculation out there, I wonder if this is just done with a lookup table. If we use a byte (generous) to identify each figure, then a table indexed by all 2^14 bit patterns will take less than 17kb. No need to do anything more clever.
- pvillano 3y ago
  I think the codes follow the pattern 1111110xxxxxxx. 1111110 is the header, and xxxxxxx is the data. The program rotates the bit string until the first seven bits match the header. This always produces the same data because there isn't a 14-bit string that can be rotated in multiple ways to have 1111110 as the header but different data.
Waterluvian 3y ago
We have this remote control spider thats fun but a pretty low quality Shenzhen special. One of the silly things about it is you can “crash” the code by managing to press forwards and backwards at the same time. The result is that it permanently tries to go forwards until you remove the batteries. Toy software and error handling is fascinating and often fun to find the bugs.
mysterydip 3y ago
Related but a nod from a toy engineer to parents: my daughter had a toy baby gamepad when she was little. The D-pad and four buttons made different sounds when pressed. I decided to try the konami code (up up down down left right left right b a) and it went through a special sound sequence then said, "you win!"
- buggy6257 3y ago
  I have this exact toy for my daughter I think. I would tinker with it a bit, I think just the fact that you hit a certain set of the buttons was enough on its own - I’d have to find the toy to test but I have heard the same voice stab but didn’t do the Konami code. Sorry to be a spoilsport! :)
  - mysterydip 3y ago
    Could be that it takes any 10 buttons in a row, but there's a specific sequence of sounds that it does when you enter it, along with "you win!" that I don't recall happening with random keypresses. It's been a while, though.
    - cluoma 3y ago
      I had my son's lying around and it definitely happens consistently with the konami code in both the 'learning' and 'playing' modes.
StinkyTechBros 3y ago
[flagged]
- whiskeytuesday 3y ago
  no.
doabell 3y ago
I remember encountering an arithmetic toy which had buttons for 1-9, as well as +-*/. If you pressed 6/2 it’d go “three”, but 7/2 would be “Haven’t learned that yet”. Though that was pretty fun.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
jonathanlydall 3y ago
I found it fascinating how my baby/toddler used to somewhat often get iPhone UIs into a weird state. Like it was half rotated, or had UI elements weirdly stuck in places they shouldn’t be. Clearly iOS has bugs where this can happen, but it requires a combination of actions that would be very bizarre for anyone older than a few years to be able to do consciously.
- justusthane 3y ago
  Babies are great at fuzzing UIs. My 6mo daughter managed to call my wife from my locked iPhone, which I didn't even know was possible. The necessary sequence is: 1. Attempt to unlock phone 2. Tap "Emergency" 3. Tap "Medical ID" 4. Tap the emergency contact to call She's also subscribed us to Amazon channels multiple times playing with the Fire TV remote.
  - encom 3y ago
    >Babies are great at fuzzing UIs. So are cats.
    - scotty79 3y ago
      My cat hard-rebooted windows 95 pc just by walking on the keyboard. No dialogs, nothing. Just immediate black screen and clean boot afterwards.
      - magicalhippo 3y ago
        Ctrl+Alt+Del would do it. It was Windows NT which brought the "lock screen" when pressing that combo.
        seabass-labrax 3y ago
        Windows XP was part of the NT line, but still had the Ctrl+Alt+Del combination for 'open Task Manager'. I think it took until Windows Vista for the 'lock screen' to be introduced, but I don't have a copy around to check.
ToucanLoucan 3y ago
Now if only we could get error handling in products for adults! It is astonishing to me and my friends how utterly useless so much modern tech is when things go wrong. It seems the default now is just an "oopsy doopsie, something went wrong! sowwy" message usually accompanied with some attempt at charming art or just a sad face emoji. Half the time we don't even get an error code, let alone a course forward to debug it.
jedberg 3y ago
It's fun being an engineer and a parent. You find yourself just naturally exploring these things. I came to the same conclusions about the toys with the binary switches, and also tried to do the unused combos. But my favorite were the toys that require the kids to twist or push buttons in a sequence. It had no batteries so it was all mechanical, and it was fun trying to reverse engineer the mechanics so that it only opened the door when the right combo was used, but also didn't seize up when the wrong combo was used, and you didn't have to "reset" it to start over.
uxamanda 3y ago
I’ve spent a bunch of time disassembling a baby toy recently to do some circuit bending / adding to my synth setup. I’d be curious if anyone here has done any of that and has any fun results to share. I got stuck because I need a more precise soldiering iron, but hope to post some results at some point.
LanceH 3y ago
I've had the idea of making clones of the most popular baby toys, but make the volume on them much, much lower. Exact same toy, much less volume. There you go, billion dollar idea. Run with it. I don't get why all the children's toys need to be so loud. These things are held inches away by a child with presumably good hearing, yet they can be heard rooms away.
- xandrius 3y ago
  If someone misplaced their kid, the could simply start playing with their favourite toy and the kid would invariably come out. It serves as a baby-retrieval device (BRD in the lingo).
  - thih9 3y ago
    It’s the other way round. If you hear toy noises from the other room, you know where the baby is and what the baby is doing (and if the toy goes silent you go investigate). Then again, grown up music is not immune to loudness wars - it shouldn’t be surprising to see the same attention grabbing mechanism in kids toys.
- sphars 3y ago
  As a parent of young kids, so much this. Many of these toys have a 3-way switch, Off, On-Volume Low, On-Volume High. The high setting is way too loud, and the low setting should be the high setting. And then there'd be a new low setting, lower than the original low.
- janci 3y ago
  A piece of clear sticky tape over the speaker grille usually works wonders.
  - kevin_thibedeau 3y ago
    I do this for piezo buzzers in a ported plastic housing. Tape silences them then you poke a hole with a tapered needle to control the volume to the desired level.
Tade0 3y ago
> That said, this article proves we have way too many battery-powered toys that make noise… I was never bothered by that. The real trial by fire for a parent are wooden toys - really loud when they hit the floor, can actually hurt and don't have any batteries to pull out. Anyway my daughter has the most recent generation of Furby given by a friend of mine working for Hasbro, whose annual bonus is apparently paid in kind. The toy is pretty sophisticated with actual, though rudimentary, voice recognition and the ability to detect and record speech, which it repeats to you with different effects, but outside from that follows a pretty strict script and I was unable to produce any errors.
bitwize 3y ago
One of the vocabulary words in the TI-99/4A's speech synthesizer accessory was "UHOH". If you used CALL SAY from Speech Editor or Extended BASIC, it would spell out words that weren't in its vocabulary and emit an "UHOH" for any symbol it didn't understand (and it understood very few, mainly + to reduce the delay between words like "SIX+TEEN" and # for multiword vocabulary items like "#TEXAS INSTRUMENTS#" and "#HANDHELD UNIT#" (early TI-ism for joysticks)). If you made the mistake of leaving alpha lock off and typing your speech string in lowercase, you got a long stream of UHOHs.
ggm 3y ago
Had two with tiny chiptunes ICs. 1990s vintage. A keyboard had a "turn me off" beep sequence and then did a 2 tone "battery flat" and stopped. The other was a flip phone which played "merrily we drive along" if you pressed a magic key sequence we never memorised, and faked out a police car siren on another, which was moderately distressing. The keyboard had 2 key rollover and was a bit bistable which one persisted. I think the keypress reader algorithm was possibly on a slow timer?
miki123211 3y ago
Not exactly a toy, but there was a talking wristwatch for the blind that would sometimes say something like "the time is: three, equals, memory clear, PM". Apparently the company, who also made other hardware for the blind, decided that it was less costly to manufacture one kind of chip for both the calculator and the watch, and then have some way of telling it which device it is, probably a pin that was either always 0 or always 1. When the battery was running low, something weird would happen and the wrong sample would sometimes play.
miki123211 3y ago
When I was a kid, I saw a toy phone that would normally play DTMF tones when you pressed a key, but also had hidden sounds for different key combinations. This was at a family gathering, so I was naturally very bored and brute-forced them all, at least the 2-key ones. I don't remember what all the hidden sounds were, just different ringtones I think. Now the engineer within me wonders if the DTMF tones it played were actually accurate.
- ggm 3y ago
  I am pretty sure I had a variant of that chip. DTMF but a police car siren, a ring tone, and "merrily we stroll along" as a tune.
- userbinator 3y ago
  I wonder if one of the hidden sounds could've been 2600Hz.
hyperman1 3y ago
'Toet toet autos' and 'Zoef zoef dieren' seem the same thing, electronically. I think they even share track width. I forgot what happens if they meet each other's codes.

169 points by dave-x 3y ago

Kind of reminds me of Gray code, who's whole shtick is being a sequence which only changes one bit at a time. If you see two bits change you know it's an error condition and can handle that explicitly. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gray_code https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gray_code

robryk 3y ago
Or just a very quick change?
- monocasa 3y ago
  With a Gray code you typically try to oversample to where it's either not an option to change that quickly, or represents an error in its own right if it does.

bombcar 3y ago

Once you recognize this you see it all over the place in kids toys. The current "toy record player" for example uses this - the "grooves" in the disk are just to press the switches in the "arm". This one: https://www.walmart.com/ip/Fisher-Price-Classics-Record-Player/33359799 https://www.walmart.com/ip/Fisher-Price-Classics-Record-Play... (the old 1978 one was just an actual "record" player).

petsfed 3y ago
I have one of the old ones. The head is actually a music-box style mechanical movement, with each "track" of the record corresponding to a particular tone. A standard music box has the notes of each tone embossed on a cylinder, or has pins installed at the location of the notes. As the cylinder rotates, the lands (that is, the raise part) of the embossing hits or plucks the strings/wires of the musical part. With the fisher-price toy, instead of a cylinder, its a disk. I've been meaning to figure out how to spec out an appropriate torsion spring to replace the one in mine, as all of the songs sound a bit slow these days. I'd also love to write a program to convert some songs from midi into a 3d-printable file to make my own records for it. I had no idea its from 1978, although that tracks with how old my siblings would've been when they got it.
- bombcar 3y ago
  It was made for quite awhile; they show up on eBay and thrift stores quite often. I actually have a half-dead one, but I'm probably never going to actually fix it.
- seabass-labrax 3y ago
  Such embossed discs were quite common in the late 19th century for various music boxes and orchestrions. It seems like they then went out of fashion in favour of paper rolls, presumably due to the increased playing time that could fit on a roll. Then of course the gramophone record was invented, so back to discs... Enter audio cassette tapes: miniature rolls. CDs. Are we in fact stuck in an eternal cycle? Where are my optical tapes?!
buildsjets 3y ago
They offered both the music-box model and the actual record player model back in the '70s. Source: I was there, and had both of them. I still have the actual record player, and a VERY beat up copy of "Mickey Mouse Disco"
- petsfed 3y ago
  That is amazing, and also kind of a durability nightmare. I wonder how they designed the needle assembly to withstand the rigors of 6-year-old operators. I must've been 12 or so before my parents would let me even touch the record player on their stereo. Not without reason, to be sure: the stereo's 8-track player had been irretrievably broken before I was born when one of my siblings decided that it looked hungry and fed it a peanut butter sandwich.
  - bombcar 3y ago
    Record player needles are surprisingly durable if you don't really care terribly much about fidelity. And the most common issue can be solved by bending it back down so it rides the groove again.

cancerhacker 3y ago

The toy emitting "ut oh" on invalid input reminded me of a phonics toy - I think it was either a schoolbus or caterpillar, where phonemes could be pressed and it would sound them out "g-oo-d" "d-aw-g" - but if as a bored parent you tried "sh-ih-t" or similar it would emit "sh-<heeheehee>" I always wondered if it was localized per-market.

bombcar 3y ago
This was likely in response to things like the famous phone incident - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ebv51QNm2Bk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ebv51QNm2Bk If you were the guy coding one of those, and you saw that, I could easily imagine putting in a special case, just for fun. The aha, I could fix that we often feel.
- Dwedit 3y ago
  There was an infamous case of some obscure Macintosh educational software that had a feature where it would read back text that you typed in. It even included a swear filter to prevent it from saying bad words. However, there was also a race condition/out of bounds memory read issue that caused it to stop reading the text you typed in, and instead start reading words directly from the swear list. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZQmL-PKr8Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZQmL-PKr8Y
  - glitchc 3y ago
    Bonus points to you!
Cerium 3y ago
As an opposite experience I bought my daughter a dump truck at Costco and got a good laugh out of it - it has a bunch of phrases, many are common. One very uncommon one is "Wow, that was a big dump!".
- compootr 3y ago
  reminds me of the better call saul toilet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dR1m29cNVsc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dR1m29cNVsc

aaronax 3y ago

I also recently analyzed the binary encoding of a baby toy. https://aaron.axvigs.com/content/leapfrog-fridge-phonics-decoded https://aaron.axvigs.com/content/leapfrog-fridge-phonics-dec...

malingo 3y ago
Ha I did the same thing after that apple was on our fridge a few days. I wondered "how does it know which letter tile is inserted?" Looked at the back of a couple of the tiles, sure enough, binary. Good catch on the ASCII values!

benkuykendall 3y ago

I couldn't really understand this paragraph. Maybe I need a worked example? > Bit rotation can be implemented using a combination of bit shifting and or operations, and on a hardware level, with different locical XOR ports. That’s of course just one way, and you still need a way to identify the number without confusing it with another figure. Although I don’t think that last was implemented: if you select your starting bits in a smart way, there won’t be any overlap. The identification system here uses 14 bits, and all of the figures have either 6 or 7 1s, making it even possible to completely ignore bit rotation and just rely on the relative position of the enabled bits to do the identification. I’m of course merely guessing at this point. Not sure what it means to "completely ignore bit rotation" and "just rely on the relative position of the enabled bits", those sound like the same thing to me. To throw my speculation out there, I wonder if this is just done with a lookup table. If we use a byte (generous) to identify each figure, then a table indexed by all 2^14 bit patterns will take less than 17kb. No need to do anything more clever.

pvillano 3y ago
I think the codes follow the pattern 1111110xxxxxxx. 1111110 is the header, and xxxxxxx is the data. The program rotates the bit string until the first seven bits match the header. This always produces the same data because there isn't a 14-bit string that can be rotated in multiple ways to have 1111110 as the header but different data.

Waterluvian 3y ago

We have this remote control spider thats fun but a pretty low quality Shenzhen special. One of the silly things about it is you can “crash” the code by managing to press forwards and backwards at the same time. The result is that it permanently tries to go forwards until you remove the batteries. Toy software and error handling is fascinating and often fun to find the bugs.

mysterydip 3y ago

Related but a nod from a toy engineer to parents: my daughter had a toy baby gamepad when she was little. The D-pad and four buttons made different sounds when pressed. I decided to try the konami code (up up down down left right left right b a) and it went through a special sound sequence then said, "you win!"

buggy6257 3y ago
I have this exact toy for my daughter I think. I would tinker with it a bit, I think just the fact that you hit a certain set of the buttons was enough on its own - I’d have to find the toy to test but I have heard the same voice stab but didn’t do the Konami code. Sorry to be a spoilsport! :)
- mysterydip 3y ago
  Could be that it takes any 10 buttons in a row, but there's a specific sequence of sounds that it does when you enter it, along with "you win!" that I don't recall happening with random keypresses. It's been a while, though.
  - cluoma 3y ago
    I had my son's lying around and it definitely happens consistently with the konami code in both the 'learning' and 'playing' modes.

StinkyTechBros 3y ago

[flagged]

whiskeytuesday 3y ago
no.

doabell 3y ago

I remember encountering an arithmetic toy which had buttons for 1-9, as well as +-*/. If you pressed 6/2 it’d go “three”, but 7/2 would be “Haven’t learned that yet”. Though that was pretty fun.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

jonathanlydall 3y ago

I found it fascinating how my baby/toddler used to somewhat often get iPhone UIs into a weird state. Like it was half rotated, or had UI elements weirdly stuck in places they shouldn’t be. Clearly iOS has bugs where this can happen, but it requires a combination of actions that would be very bizarre for anyone older than a few years to be able to do consciously.

justusthane 3y ago
Babies are great at fuzzing UIs. My 6mo daughter managed to call my wife from my locked iPhone, which I didn't even know was possible. The necessary sequence is: 1. Attempt to unlock phone 2. Tap "Emergency" 3. Tap "Medical ID" 4. Tap the emergency contact to call She's also subscribed us to Amazon channels multiple times playing with the Fire TV remote.
- encom 3y ago
  >Babies are great at fuzzing UIs. So are cats.
  - scotty79 3y ago
    My cat hard-rebooted windows 95 pc just by walking on the keyboard. No dialogs, nothing. Just immediate black screen and clean boot afterwards.
    - magicalhippo 3y ago
      Ctrl+Alt+Del would do it. It was Windows NT which brought the "lock screen" when pressing that combo.
      - seabass-labrax 3y ago
        Windows XP was part of the NT line, but still had the Ctrl+Alt+Del combination for 'open Task Manager'. I think it took until Windows Vista for the 'lock screen' to be introduced, but I don't have a copy around to check.

ToucanLoucan 3y ago

Now if only we could get error handling in products for adults! It is astonishing to me and my friends how utterly useless so much modern tech is when things go wrong. It seems the default now is just an "oopsy doopsie, something went wrong! sowwy" message usually accompanied with some attempt at charming art or just a sad face emoji. Half the time we don't even get an error code, let alone a course forward to debug it.

jedberg 3y ago

It's fun being an engineer and a parent. You find yourself just naturally exploring these things. I came to the same conclusions about the toys with the binary switches, and also tried to do the unused combos. But my favorite were the toys that require the kids to twist or push buttons in a sequence. It had no batteries so it was all mechanical, and it was fun trying to reverse engineer the mechanics so that it only opened the door when the right combo was used, but also didn't seize up when the wrong combo was used, and you didn't have to "reset" it to start over.

uxamanda 3y ago

I’ve spent a bunch of time disassembling a baby toy recently to do some circuit bending / adding to my synth setup. I’d be curious if anyone here has done any of that and has any fun results to share. I got stuck because I need a more precise soldiering iron, but hope to post some results at some point.

LanceH 3y ago

I've had the idea of making clones of the most popular baby toys, but make the volume on them much, much lower. Exact same toy, much less volume. There you go, billion dollar idea. Run with it. I don't get why all the children's toys need to be so loud. These things are held inches away by a child with presumably good hearing, yet they can be heard rooms away.

xandrius 3y ago
If someone misplaced their kid, the could simply start playing with their favourite toy and the kid would invariably come out. It serves as a baby-retrieval device (BRD in the lingo).
- thih9 3y ago
  It’s the other way round. If you hear toy noises from the other room, you know where the baby is and what the baby is doing (and if the toy goes silent you go investigate). Then again, grown up music is not immune to loudness wars - it shouldn’t be surprising to see the same attention grabbing mechanism in kids toys.
sphars 3y ago
As a parent of young kids, so much this. Many of these toys have a 3-way switch, Off, On-Volume Low, On-Volume High. The high setting is way too loud, and the low setting should be the high setting. And then there'd be a new low setting, lower than the original low.
janci 3y ago
A piece of clear sticky tape over the speaker grille usually works wonders.
- kevin_thibedeau 3y ago
  I do this for piezo buzzers in a ported plastic housing. Tape silences them then you poke a hole with a tapered needle to control the volume to the desired level.

Tade0 3y ago

> That said, this article proves we have way too many battery-powered toys that make noise… I was never bothered by that. The real trial by fire for a parent are wooden toys - really loud when they hit the floor, can actually hurt and don't have any batteries to pull out. Anyway my daughter has the most recent generation of Furby given by a friend of mine working for Hasbro, whose annual bonus is apparently paid in kind. The toy is pretty sophisticated with actual, though rudimentary, voice recognition and the ability to detect and record speech, which it repeats to you with different effects, but outside from that follows a pretty strict script and I was unable to produce any errors.

bitwize 3y ago

One of the vocabulary words in the TI-99/4A's speech synthesizer accessory was "UHOH". If you used CALL SAY from Speech Editor or Extended BASIC, it would spell out words that weren't in its vocabulary and emit an "UHOH" for any symbol it didn't understand (and it understood very few, mainly + to reduce the delay between words like "SIX+TEEN" and # for multiword vocabulary items like "#TEXAS INSTRUMENTS#" and "#HANDHELD UNIT#" (early TI-ism for joysticks)). If you made the mistake of leaving alpha lock off and typing your speech string in lowercase, you got a long stream of UHOHs.

ggm 3y ago

Had two with tiny chiptunes ICs. 1990s vintage. A keyboard had a "turn me off" beep sequence and then did a 2 tone "battery flat" and stopped. The other was a flip phone which played "merrily we drive along" if you pressed a magic key sequence we never memorised, and faked out a police car siren on another, which was moderately distressing. The keyboard had 2 key rollover and was a bit bistable which one persisted. I think the keypress reader algorithm was possibly on a slow timer?

miki123211 3y ago

Not exactly a toy, but there was a talking wristwatch for the blind that would sometimes say something like "the time is: three, equals, memory clear, PM". Apparently the company, who also made other hardware for the blind, decided that it was less costly to manufacture one kind of chip for both the calculator and the watch, and then have some way of telling it which device it is, probably a pin that was either always 0 or always 1. When the battery was running low, something weird would happen and the wrong sample would sometimes play.

miki123211 3y ago

When I was a kid, I saw a toy phone that would normally play DTMF tones when you pressed a key, but also had hidden sounds for different key combinations. This was at a family gathering, so I was naturally very bored and brute-forced them all, at least the 2-key ones. I don't remember what all the hidden sounds were, just different ringtones I think. Now the engineer within me wonders if the DTMF tones it played were actually accurate.

ggm 3y ago
I am pretty sure I had a variant of that chip. DTMF but a police car siren, a ring tone, and "merrily we stroll along" as a tune.
userbinator 3y ago
I wonder if one of the hidden sounds could've been 2600Hz.

hyperman1 3y ago

'Toet toet autos' and 'Zoef zoef dieren' seem the same thing, electronically. I think they even share track width. I forgot what happens if they meet each other's codes.