Final Project

The gist: A Furby is a toy made by the Hasbro company that has been viral for decades. Owing to its robustness and the complexity that Furbies exhibit to many, it is a common toy that is disassembled and hijacked by engineers. Common projects include using an Arduino to control various functions, or even IoT enabled versions (only with later models that support IoT natively).

We decided to take the project an unusual route and use FPGAs to interact with them. We began by planning out how we wanted to hijack the furby.

Based on a pre-existing diagram found here, we created a plan on how to modify the Furby (2000-era) in our possession. Owing to the unfortunate coincidence of this academic semester with the SARS-COV-2 Pandemic, electrical work was done over Zoom, on James' end. We managed to open up the Furby and use a multimeter to find various voltages. As the board's operating voltages were on 3v3, the direct connections between the furby and the PMOD would have fried the PMOD, if not the PMOD and the FPGA.

As a result, we decided to use PWM and a capacitor to create a voltage drop between 6v and the required test point (5v), as we would be able to create a -1v average voltage using a 1/3 duty cycle. Unfortunately, the PMOD we purchased had little to no documentation accompanying it, and there were no information guides to be found online. To avoid potentially frying the FPGA, the group decided not to directly connect any of the connections to the Furby directly.

On the other hand, the group was able to create an audio demo to show how the board would be able to output audio, and were even able to play the test sound through a speaker. The next steps with this would be to play audio from an SD card; however, the timeframe allotted to the project, in addition to the lack of online documentation prevented us from going further.

Overall, this project did not go as planned; however, considering the resources available and the global condition, we are happy to conclude at this point.