about the furby

I never had an original Furby when I was a kid. But, boy, do I remember them. Who doesn’t?

It sticks out in my mind as one of those things that was at first very mysterious but became deeply familiar over time. At its core, the Furby is a collection of simple I/O peripherals orchestrated by a microcontroller. It’s the kind of thing that shows up in my work in the lab all the time, so I know it well. Yet the Furby is fundamentally different from my usual instruments because it is a technologically-advanced item that doesn’t actually do anything. And I think that makes it a bold artistic statement.

At one point in my life, it was an unknown entity–something which might have been capable of learning new tricks or performing creepy acts of sentience. I can clearly remember rumors about Furbies waking up, chattering in the middle of the night. They will always be a bit of an urban legend, and they just so happen to be the exact kind of thing that I like to tinker with these days.

So I bought a Furby with the intention of giving it a little “tweak” to make it an entry for a Halloween contest. Some might say that it’s creepy enough as-is, but I’ve always been a big believer in pushing the limits of spookiness. I’m channeling my inner Frankenstein here. I need to replace the brain.

The goal is to clone a Raspberry Pi Pico to replace the Furby’s microcontroller. With programmatic control over the Furby’s inputs and outputs, an interesting world of possibilities opens up. The art of the hack will be its subtlety. From the outside, it should not be possible to detect any change to the Furby. But something about it will be just a little different from how you remember. Were they always this…strange?