genzai·chi

Circuit-bending a Funky Furby #5: switches

Working directly on the circuitboards to find glitches was very difficult, especially since most actions involve, well, action and the Furby kept moving around.

Not a particularly effective solution...

Removing the feet again allows the Furby to stand fairly steadily on the base of the battery compartment without the leg cams reaching the surface it’s on to make the body move. However, this also means you have to down tools and pick the Furby up each time you need to turn him onandoffagain. With all the exposed mechanics and electronics, finding a safe place to pick him up by is a challenge in itself.

On-off switch

The on-off switch doesn’t appear to be directly connected to the battery compartment as in simpler electronic toys I’ve worked with, instead 3 wires come out from the back of the switch and join onto the circuitboard.

snipped wires from on-off switch

I just snipped the yellow, red and green wires about an inch away from the switch (enough to leave me room to solder back onto the wires going into the switch, if needed) and then extended the wires connected to the circuitboard and soldered a SPDT toggle switch onto the other ends.

Extensions to the on-off switch wires

Tickle me

I also wanted to add remote switches to the belly, mouth and back of the Furby. All these plug into the circuitboard and, thanks to the coloured wires, are reasonably easy to identify.

These are actually connections for LEDs (see later) but the principle is the same for the switches

It’s also pretty straightforward to solder a couple of extra wires onto the leads of the plugs where they come out onto the front of the circuitboard. I’m just using some momentary push-to-make switches to trigger the Furby. It’s nice to have a few actions that are not in response to voice commands.

Audio jack, glitch switch and push buttons for belly and back

I also tried to use a push-to-make switch to control the sound glitch, but found I was killing a lot of switches in the process. At first I thought I was over-heating them at the soldering stage and messing up some of the internal contacts, but I eventually noticed (with the help of my multimeter) that it was after a few pushes that the switch stopped working. I thought that the current might be too high for the switches and so added in a 10ohm resistor, but was still getting sketchy results.

Increasing the resistance had the effect of speeding up the sound (not particularly desirable) so rather than increase the resistance I eventually abandoned the push-to-make switches in favour of a chunkier toggle switch (also with 10 ohm resistor).

At one stage I tried a large latching push-to-make switch, but I struggled with this because it was never clear whether it was on or off. If you’re going to go down this route, I suggest maybe using one with an indicator LED…

All-in-all there’s now a significant number of wires coming off the Furby and the solder points are quite delicate – particularly those ones that connect directly to the circuitboard. In order to add some protection against accidental pulls, I tied a piece of nylon cord to some of the plastic structure of the Furby and added a few polymorph figure-of-eights. I then looped each wire through the figure-of-eights before then taking it to the switch box. The nylon is slightly shorter than the length of the wires and tied off inside the switch box so it should hopefully take the brunt of any excess force.

Cord stay to protect wires from being pulled off

The switch box: main on-off switch and audio jack, glitch toggle switch and 3 buttons for belly, mouth and back triggers

Flashy lights

I’ve also attached a few LEDs to various points on the circuitboard (again, the solder points on the other side to where plugs attach). These were initially soldered straight onto the board, but have now been added onto wires in series with a 1k ohm resistor.

Initial (temporary) location of LEDs

As I write this, the LEDs have made it to the ends of his ears and mohican spikey thing, but I’m not quite satisfied with the result. More tinkering required – perhaps either to add more LEDs down the length of the ears, or to add some sort of translucent cover.

I need a name from nikkipugh on Vimeo.

Circuit-bending a Funky Furby #4: audio jack

As I mentioned in the last post, I found some sound bends on the Funky Furby I’m circuit-bending.

The next step was to add an audio jack so I could play the Furby’s sound through a mini amp.

This is only the second project I’ve ever added an audio output to, so I’m still kind of fumbling my way through.

To cut a long story short, through a combination of peering at Alfonso’s innards and section 7 of this circuit bending faq, I arrived at the following:

Wiring of the audio jack, including a 10 ohm resistor between points a and c

I’m using a 3.5mm enclosed chassis mount jack socket from RS, (part number 106-874), which has quite an open structure, so it’s pretty easy to see which bit is which.

Basically the two bottom connectors are the signals, and the one coming off the side is the ground.

Here’s a diagram of the wiring and how it connects up to the circuitboard and the speaker:

Diagram showing the wiring arrangement I ended up with for the audio jack

It’s ever so slightly different from what’s described on the oscillateur faq page, since I’m connecting c to b, rather than c to the ground of the speaker. I did try that, but got no sound.

The other thing I’m finding is that I still get sound from the Furby’s speaker when I plug the amp in. This doesn’t happen when the resistor is omitted, but the sound quality isn’t so nice, so I think I’ll put up with that.

I’m still not really convinced I’m doing this right, but I’ve not yet found any other combination of wiring that works. Maybe I’ve got my positive and negative terminals on the speaker mixed up?

If anyone can point me in the direction of a solution then I’d be most grateful, because this is something that’s going to keep coming up and I’d quite like to learn how to do it properly!

Update!
I had wrongly identified which were the positive and negative terminals on the speaker. After changing that starting point, the audio jack now works as expected with the following wiring:

Correct (I think!) wiring for the audio jack. Without an amp plugged in, the Furby's internal speaker is used. When the amp is plugged in, the internal speaker cuts out.

Circuit-bending a Funky Furby #3: sound chip

Today I found a stable bend point on the Funky Furby I’m trying to circuit-bend!

On a whim I started exploring the small chip behind his left ear and I found this:

Connecting a few different pins (with a wire, to short circuit them) gives the same effect. I’ve marked them in the photo below…

Pink lines show where to short across the pins to get the effect in the recording. There are 4 different wiring options shown here - just choose one!

These bends don’t affect movement at all. Though I’m happy to have found these ones – and think they’ll sound great when amplified – it’d be nice to have some movement loops too…

Update: Pete Ashton has set the above sound file to music

Circuit-bending a Funky Furby #2: looking for bends

I’ve not really got organised properly with this yet, but did stumble across a short-circuit yesterday that locked some of the motor stuff into a loop.

Motor glitch from nikkipugh on Vimeo.

Another furby bend point. Possibly. from nikkipugh on Vimeo.

Talking to the furby or pressing the belly or back switches doesn’t break the loop, so at the moment it looks like the only way to interrrupt the cycle is to turnitonandoffagain.

Circuit-bending a Funky Furby #1: de-skinning

Whilst there’s quite a few resources available online to help out with any planned circuit-bending of a regular furby, I’ve been unsuccessful in my searches for information relating to circuit-bending their larger relative, the Funky Furby.

This is probably one of the reasons why the purple and green critter I picked up at a carboot sale over the summer has been sat on my hack-shelf for so long, without even so much as having had fresh batteries put in it.

It is also the reason why I’m going to document as much of the process here as I can, starting with today’s instalment: de-skinning.

The first task is to remove the feet. This is likely to be the biggest hurdle due to the need for a triangular-shaped screwdriver. If you’ve got that (and a normal, small-sized cross-head screwdriver), then the rest is really quite straightforward.

The inner screw that joins the feet to the main body

After removing the two screws in the base of each foot, you can lift off the fleshy toe bit to reveal a second, black mount. This is where the feet connect to the main body, so you’ll need to remove these too. Once you have removed these (the screws are quite long) put all the foot parts and screws to one side – you’ll need these again later.

Under the feet

Removing the black mounts reveals a panel of plain material (rather than fur) with a small hole in it. If you poke around through this hole, back in the direction towards the battery compartment, you should be able to hook a finger (or maybe a screwdriver) under the black plastic strip that is sewn onto the white cloth along the corner edge where the battery compartment sticks up. Pull hard to undo the clip and free the fabric.

The tabs that hold the fabric in place around the base

The tabs that hold the fabric in place around the base

Some of the tabs on my furby came out ok, but one or two snapped. Your mileage may vary…

After that, it’s a case of gradually peeling the fur up over the top of the furby.

Skin peel

It’s easiest to work up over the back and bring the pelt over the front of the face. There are a few more of those tab things, and a few other places where you need to unhook bits and pieces, but you don’t need to snip any of the stitching or anything around the face plate – the aim is just to clear the fur layer from the back half of the shell and any of the articulated bits coming out from the inside of the shell.

The tips of the ear levers need to be unpopped.

The eyebrow elastic needs unhooking from here

Once you have done this, you can unscrew the two halves of the shell and the fur, still attached by the face plate to the front half, can just stay how it is. The microphone is attached to the front half of the shell – unscrew this so you can remove the furby innards completely.

Furby innards revealed

From here you can reattach the feet to give the little critter some stability and then you can do whatever you’re going to do with the electronics…

Kind of cute...

Circuitboard easily accesible on the side

As I said, I haven’t found any references for bend points, so there’s a high chance the furby won’t make it through the next stage where I noodle around on the circuitboard looking for glitches. I made sure to get some video of him doing his stuff before I went any further:

Funky Furby from nikkipugh on Vimeo.

…after which I did actually Read The Manual and found out that you have to play music at it for it to dance!

I need to rig up some sort of jig or stand to hold the furby off the ground for the next stage – triggering sounds also means triggering movement and that makes it really difficult to work on the circuitboard to try and find the bends.

Hopefully the furby will survive long enough to have something to put in the next of what is planned to be a series of posts documenting the circuitbending process…

Box with a secret knock in it

In the second of my two interviews this week, I was invited by Whitmore Park Primary School in Coventry to help them look at ways to develop their children’s skills as active learners in mathematics.

With only a day and a half’s notice for the interview – which required me to design and deliver a ten minute activity with a group of pupils – the only sensible thing to do was not only to figure out the content of the activity, but also to embark on constructing a technological doohickie, the workings of which I had no prior experience in! Well, it’s all good learning, isn’t it?!

The things I wanted to achieve through the activity were:

• To have the activity pupil-led as much as the restrictions in time would allow.
• To use an approach that referenced my previous immersive experience projects and/or Mantle of the Expert, in order to provide a starting point for conversations regarding strategies of role play and active learning.
• To use a medium that highlighted a ’special’ technical skill that I could contribute to the mix – ie something not likely to already be available or in use within the school.
• Something that felt to me like it was a genuine activity, and not too much like ‘maths dressed up’.
• Something with a bit of ‘wow’ to it.

Riffing of something I had referenced in my application, I decided to do something based on code-breaking, but I wanted this to involve a physical object – one that would respond when the code had been broken. This, I felt, would give me a chance to make something using my hack/electronics skills which, whilst not being up to much in the grand scheme of things, should be adequate enough to impress a 9 year old…

After much searching of Instructables and Hackaday looking for the right combination of inspiration and cold, hard instruction, I decided to work with a system for recognising sequences of knocks in order to open a box. For this I am deeply indebted to Steve Hoefer’s detailed documentation of his Arduino-based Secret Knock Detecting Door Lock, which I only modified slightly to take into account the resources I had available.

Secret knock box gubbins: components labelled up to facilitate explaining what they were for, free ends of wires labelled up so that they could quickly be replaced in the right row of the breadboard if they accidentally came out...

Since it was only a ten minute activity, I decided to leave the components on the breadboard, rather than permanently soldering them up. It was also for this reason that I was reluctant to drill holes in the box I had acquisitioned to use as the casing. The downside of this being that there wasn’t really much in the way of a feedback mechanism, because the LEDs were not visible. As a compromise, I fitted a buzzer in the place of the door-knob opening motor so that the box would buzz when the correct knock was given. I also implied a lock through the way that I introduced the box and handled it in front of the children.

Here it is in action:

box with a secret knock in it. from nikkipugh on Vimeo.

When it was time for the kids to go into action, I reverted to the now familiar Agent N role and gave them an introduction that indicated that they were a specially selected team of code-breakers and we’d been given a mission to investigate this box.

I had some vague knowledge about such things, but I certainly didn’t hold any answers. After telling them they needed to find the secret knock, I handed them two folders containing stuff that might be clues and asked to “please tell me what you think”… I encouraged the children to help eachother out, and also to offer lots of different ideas and hypotheses.

A selection of clues from which the children successfully built up and interpreted a diagram of the secret knock's rythmn.

From there I nudged and guided, seeking to let the pupils make the connections between the different clues wherever possible. We just managed to open the box in time!

The session was a bit slower and lower energy than I had imagined it would be. On reflection I think this was as much to do with nerves and shyness on the part of the pupils (I was the first artist they were interviewing) as much as anything in my control. Certainly the three children who had previously accompanied me on a tour of the school seemed more relaxed and outgoing than the others who had only just met me. The nice moment was when the Deputy Head came back to the room and asked what they had done. The description they gave, with no input from me, was spot-on and showed a sophisticated understanding of the principles involved.

Given the opportunity, I would love to expand this into a much longer activity in which we could solve the initial code, investigate how the box works and then – because obviously the code was too easy – reprogramme it with another knock and get the children to invent ways of codifying that information in an even more fiendishly difficult manner…

People in; slightly different people out

Museums as experience machines

So far my 2010 has been very focussed on schools and learning as I first spent a week responding to the second wave of Creative Partnership calls for this academic year and then attending interviews as a result.

Roughly half of the interviews I am invited to involve having to deliver a short activity (10-20 minutes) to a small group of the children. Considering my whole approach to projects is based on collaboration and a particular process aimed at responding to each individual context, it’s quite strange to find myself being judged on solo delivery of something workshoppy to a group I’ve not had any previous contact with!

I’d like to think that with my cross-disciplinary background one of my main selling points is that with pupil-led projects I’m pretty well equipped to be able to bring in practical skills that relate to wherever we end up. This too makes it tricky to decide on just one activity to represent me, because I’m not working from a starting point of offering a particular medium in response to a brief. Again all about the process.

Anyhoo, irony of the situation aside, these activities can be very interesting in their own right.

On Monday I was in a school that was looking for someone to help facilitate Year 5 (9-10 years old) in designing and making their “Museum of Water”. I was really interested in this call because of the way it had been presented as very pupil-led and also because, through my work with pervasive games and hackerspaces, I’ve been involved in various conversations coming from museum professionals that resonate strongly with those of schools. We all want meaningful interactions.

15 minutes isn’t really enough time for introductions and then anything much in the way of making, so I decided to aim for something much more feasible …like a paradigm shift!

I wanted the school to see their museum-to-be not as a collection of objects, or of documentation of learning objectives, but as a process. People go into the museum and the museum has some sort of effect on them such that the people leaving the museum are slightly different to when they went in. Otherwise, what’s the point?

I started the session in my favourite manner – by getting things wrong.

Hi, my name’s Nikki and I do all sorts of creative stuff. I’m here because I saw your advert for someone to help you make a Museum of Water.

Well, I thought that was really very easy, so I just went ahead and made it for you. [places 2 litre lemonade bottle partially filled with water on table]

Can I have my £3000, please?

[Silence]

Oh, hang on!

[Places bottle on top of cardboard box pedestal]

[Silence accompanied by glances]

What’s wrong? Can I have my money please?

From this starting point, we were able to have a conversation where the pupils explained to me that, even if I labelled the water, just to have a bottle of water on display wasn’t good enough – they wanted a museum that was interactive and taught people interesting things. They weren’t very impressed with my offering at all.

My next move was to invite everyone down to the other end of the room where I had cleared some floorspace. Within the context of what they had just told me, I introduced the idea that I wanted them to think of their museum as an experience machine. I wasn’t interested in what was inside it right now, but I wanted to think of who went in, and what we wanted them to be like when they left.

Quick profiles of incoming and outgoing museum visitors

Two of the children lay down on some large pieces of paper and struck appropriate poses whilst we drew around them. First of all we gathered around the outgoing visitor and noted and sketched our thoughts about what we wanted people to be doing and feeling after visiting our museum. I was really impressed at the contributions made in what I think was less than 5 minutes.

At one point I announced I was going to write down the obvious and added “happy”. This triggered a conversation about whether we would ever want people to leave the museum feeling sad. Yes they said: there were some very serious things relating to the topic of water and they might want people to be moved by these. When I asked for an example, one boy said that sometimes people drown in water. We agreed it would be important to teach people how to be safe.

With very little time left, we quickly added some thoughts to the picture of the incoming visitor. These were very illuminating in terms of how they perceived museums. Or how they thought museums were perceived – anyway, a very stark difference to the very positive picture they had painted in the previous two activities!

And that was the end of the session ..or it was supposed to be: it took a bit of effort to get the children to stop adding to the picture!

A few pupils helped me take photos of the drawings before I departed (I left the originals with the school – along with the bottle of water, for which I kindly waived the £3000 fee). Below is a slideshow of some of the images…

They’ve set themselves some very high standards in light of what appears to be a somewhat challenging target audience – I hope they can realise them.

compass

From a set on Flickr

story for a flow chart

I’d be really interested in hearing more about who you consider your influences or precursors in installation art – I’m vaguely drawing up an enormous Flowchart Of Pervasive Games And Where They Come From And All That Sort Of Thing, which is obviously never going to be even slightly exhaustive but which might be fun to have around. I don’t have much from installation art there – any suggestions?

Holly in the comments for a previous post

I was pretty rubbish for about the first 2 of my 3 years doing A-Level Art and Design, so I’m guessing this happened in about 1996/7, after a certain rollicking from Hillary regarding some lino prints got me thinking more about process and journey.

I got the train up from Southampton to London to Go And Look At Some Art. I think what I did was to rock up, find a newsagents, have a flick through Time Out and see what looked interesting. …and so I ended up in somewhere I think was probably Mile End.

This was a part of London I’d never been to before and it was all pretty scary. When I finally found the address given in Time Out, the building was big, not at all what I was expecting (like an old town house or civic building of some sort) and very locked looking. In fact, very boarded-up looking…

After a bit of hesitation and hopeful looking around for any indication at all that this might have been a gallery, I plucked up the courage to ring the buzzer indicated by a note attached to the door that might have been referring to the art I was seeking. When the door was opened, and the correct place had been confirmed, I was led inside and it became apparent that the building was well on its way to becoming derelict: I was guided around holes in the stairs and there were bare floorboards and bare wires.

A few storeys up, we came to a door with a small wooden chair placed next to it.

I was to go inside and be careful. The man would be waiting for me outside.

The dark room I stepped into was one of those where there would ordinarily have been 3 or 4 steps down from the door to floor level. However, the artist had constructed his own floor that began at door level and then cut through the room sloping both up and away towards the back of the room and also from left to right. The new floor was made of metal grill, so as my eyes became accustomed to the dark I could begin to make out the cables snaking across the original floor below, a couple of vertical columns piercing up through the grill from below and also some faint light associated with those columns.

I slowly made my way across the metal structure, all the while aware of my location in the middle of the room. Approaching and then looking down into one of the columns, it became apparent that there was a monitor at the bottom showing some video. I can’t remember much about the video, except my impression is that it was a blueish monochrome and the images might have been abstracted shots of human bodies. I don’t recall there being a narrative or a soundtrack (although there might have been sound).

…and that was it, really: a wonky floor and a few monitors you could look down on through rectangular tubes. I was in there for so long that the artist sat waiting outside was wondering whether he should come in and check on me!

When I did finally leave the room, I was invited to chat with the artist for a little while. I’m not sure if he and the other artists working in the building were squatting or not, but he was living – for the time being at least – in a small room not much bigger than the mattress on the floor and cooking from a primus type thing in the corner.

We talked for a bit and then I left to continue my day of art-looking.

I don’t remember anything else I saw that day.

I do, however, remember telling the story of seeing that installation over and over again when I got back to college. My tutors were concerned that I had put myself in danger, and in retrospect I probably had. Fortunately though, it had all worked out fine and for the last year of that A-Level my work was predominantly installation-based and so much the better for it.

***
So, an experience of installation art that had a big influence me. If we’re drawing lines from that day to my thoughts and doings with pervasive games now, it would be tempting to label them thus:

• Following a scrap of tempting information into the unknown.
• Pushing beyond the edge of your comfort zone.
• Putting your trust in strangers.
• Only you and the other thing.
• Experiencing with all the senses.
• Forgotten or overlooked spaces.
• Because we want to make something.
• Sharing the story afterwards.

A bull in Balsall Heath

I’ve been threatening to use time over the Christmas holidays to get to grips with Scratch, a programming environment aimed at young people. I’ve been curious about it for a year or so and have recently had some conversations with people who have practical experience of using it in schools that has inspired me to actually get on and investigate it.

Coding blocks in Scratch

I’m thinking that to start off with I’m likely to apply it to animation-themed projects – you just don’t see briefs asking for people to come in and teach kids how to code! Shame that: beyond systematic approaches, applying mathematical concepts etc etc, I think there’s something particularly valuable in the process of debugging that can be applied to wider things. Fits in with my thoughts about protovation and creativity.

Anyway, as ever with these freestyle learning things, it can be a bit tricky to conjure up mini-projects to provide an impetus. Fortunately though I’ve had a huffing duck to work with and then an escaped bull went for a wander around Balsall Heath.

Balsall Heath, bull and the Shouty Lady

I lived in Balsall Heath last year, so I kind of got a bit distracted by the backgrounds and distilling some key landmarks into simple graphic form, rather than designing a game, as was the original intention. Still, there was a lot to be learned in just getting the background tiles to scroll as the bull works its way up Moseley/Alcester Road. [Addendum: This whole thing probably won't mean anything to you if you don't know the area. If that's the case, here's a link to the Google Street View to give you a toehold.]

Moseley baths

After some wrangling as to whether I was going to make it a shoot-em-up in the style of the real-life story, I eventually decided that that wasn’t a route I wanted to go down (well, it is Christmas!) so the hazard comes in the form of the Shouty Lady.

One of my overall impressions of living in Balsall Heath was that there always seemed to be people shouting in the streets. Not increased-volume-so-my-mate-over-there-can-hear-me shouting, but full-on screechy argument shouting at the person stood right by them, or perhaps now walking on the other side of the road. After a few months I began to recognise that, more often than not, it was the same woman doing the shouting…

So, in the Balsall Bull ‘game’ the Shouty Lady will appear at random intervals and potentially scupper your overall aim of getting to the curry house.

Scratch isn’t set up for embedding per se, but I’ve put Balsall Bull on a separate page so you can have a play if you’d like to. If you don’t see it on the page, you’ll need to download and install Java to be able to run the applet thingy.

To play Balsall Bull, use the arrow keys to guide the bull along the road, click the green flag in the top right corner if it goes sqiffy and, above all else, beware the Shouty Lady.