Hardware Hacking Projects for Geeks

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Part I: Basic Hacks, Tools, and Techniques

How to Hack a Generic Talking Toy

In 1989 a group calling itself The Barbie Liberation Organization pur-

chased 300 talking Barbie and GI Joe dolls and switched the voice chips.

They then placed these “hacked” toys back on toy-store shelves to be pur-

chased by unsuspecting children. The hacked GI Joe dolls said things like

“I love school. Don’t you?” and “Let’s sing with the band tonight.” The

hacked Barbie said phrases like “Dead men tell no lies.” Newspapers across

the country picked up the story and an urban legend was born. This “act

of sabotage” (according to a few of the Mattel and Hasbro people I worked

with) occurred when I was working as a toy designer.

A year or two later, a talking Barbie playset that I designed hit the market.

At about the same time, Mattel released a new talking Barbie, one of whose

phrases included “Math class is tough.” The story of the non–politically

correct Barbie hit the press and sent my product to an early grave. (I think

Mattel pulled all talking Barbies for a while after that.)

However, the talking Barbie playset I designed was much cooler than a

simple doll that said inane things. My playset could read special tags on

the doll’s clothing to determine where the doll was and trigger short dialogs

that included the location and clothing. And it never said anything about

mathematics…I swear!

In this section I’ll show you how you can hack a small talking toy so you

too can sow a little subversion of your own.

Project Overview

First you will disassemble the voice box backpack—included with most

small action figures—that holds the manufacturer’s phrases. Next, you will

modify a voice-recording module from Radio Shack and install it in place

of the original. The following steps will walk you through the modification

process.

Hardware Assembly Instructions

This project requires taking apart the simple electronics from a small talk-

ing toy and replacing them with a set of electronics from Radio Shack. I

used a military action figure. Locate the materials in Exhibit B before you

start.

1. Disassemble the backpack

Remove the screws that hold the two plastic halves of the pack together, as

shown in Figure 5-37.

Speaker

wires

Battery

wires

Figure 5-37:

Toy figure packback

Finding the Sound

Electronics

Most talking toys have a backpack of

some sort where the electronics are

hidden. If there is no backpack, look

inside the chest cavity of the toy.

How to Hack a Generic Talking Toy

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