Furby Borges
By Ben Everard. Posted
This article was originally published as part of HackSpace magazine, which has since been incorporated into Raspberry Pi Official Magazine.
In 2018, Roni Bandini hacked a Furby to turn it into a Jorge Luis Borges-quoting animatronic. He left as many components in situ as possible, only bypassing the audio, to create an effect that worked, but wasn’t as good as it could have been.
Five years later, the JL Borges Furby is reborn. Roni has removed the original electronics that controlled the Furby’s mouth and eyes, opting to replace them with an Arduino Nano and an H-bridge. He’s got rid of the original sound effects equipment, replacing it with a DFRobot DFPlayer Mini MP3 player. He’s also used a passive infrared sensor, so that whenever someone walks past the furry they’re treated to a snippet of the great Argentinian writer’s work.
Ben is the Editor of HackSpace magazine. When not wrangling words, he enjoys cycling, gardening, and attempting to identify wild mushrooms.
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