Foofy The Furby Of Judgement

Open AI powered Furby with the ability to critique code

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Inspiration

This was an interesting one, nothing specific really inspired this. I (jellybeanstaffy) had a few Furbys kicking about and thought it would be entertaining to do something with one of them. One discussion lead to another from having a furby that could slap your with a rubber glove to an AI driven furby capable of snide code judgement.

What it does

Helps people to code with 'encouraging' and 'helpful' comments, reading over and assessing how good the code and writing of it is with emotions to reflect.

How we built it

I (jellybeanstaffy) was working on the hardware side of things, it was honestly a jumbled mess. From dissecting to reverse engineering the furby i had quite a hand full and many issues along the way resulting in numerous botch jobs to hold the project together from differential power supplies to hammering a servo to death.

Challenges we ran into

from the hardware side i (jellybeanstaffy) ran into many issues. dissembling the furby took longer than expected and reverse engineering parts of it were a bit of a nightmare, especially with no plan of two way motor control and none of the resources to deal with that. the solution in the end was a differential power supply and a servo running at about 20Hz, not great for the servo but good enough for a temporary fix. Additional issues with firmware design followed for me due to an unusual encoder design used in the furby, many issues arising because of this

Accomplishments that we're proud of

(jellybeanstaffy) I'm happy with how the hardware side turned out. It's a mess of botch jobs and is held together with wishes and prayers but the hardware works despite many unexpected issues.

What we learned

(jellybeanstaffy) i have disassembled and modified a few furbies before, namely original ones, and underestimated the complexity of the 2012 models. I've learned a good chunk about the hardware systems of more modern furbies and how to control said furby over serial in python.

What's next for Foofy

(jellybeanstaffy) a lot of the current hardware is quite botched and impractical, better modifications can be made to the hardware to improve the design. I have several more furbies lying about and may also modify them to join Foofy in a hoard of judgemental intelligent furbies. Massive improvements are also needed to the firmware i designed for foofy, it has a lot of bugs

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