CurlyCart: How To Hack Your Power Wheels 64
Dana Spiegel writes: "A bunch of us were bored one weekend, so we decided to hack a Power Wheels car (you remeber the G.I. Joe jeep and the Barbie car, don't you?) to make it record and playback where you've driven in it. We're continuing development on this project (covered in web page), but mostly this thing is just fun to play with."
Dorks. (Score:1)
And this could have practical applications, too: Fr'instance, you could use it to have an autopilot on wheelchairs.. Oh, what am I talking about. This is just nifty.
Brant
Pretty cool hack. (Score:1)
One thing I would like to see if this little controlled cart unleashed in the BattleBots Arena. That plastic would be chewed up rather quickly. Would be a joy to watch, though.
That's great (Score:3)
Power Wheels? (Score:4)
I dunno bout u... (Score:5)
Re:It just goes to show... (Score:1)
torture (Score:1)
Although I can see someone using this to torture their kid brother or sister, or a niece or nephew.
"Bobby, you don't understand, Uncle Sluggo is going to make you toy *better*"
(insert evil laff here)
Or a college fraternity initiation ritual.
"You must ride this for at least one hour, while guzzling down the infamous Slammo Cocktail"
Could this be the future of driving? (Score:1)
The greatest feature, and largest problem, with this situation is the fact that there will be no human interaction. Driving is a very dangerous; you're hurling 3 ton pieces of metal at each other at 50 mph, all for the sake of convienience. But driving is something people like to do (if it isn't 5 mph bumper to bumper on your way to work, that is), so we would not want to stop just to save a few lives.
With this system of recording your path, and also a smart driving system that knows not to ram into other drivers and to stop at red lights, you could record that crawl you call a commute once, and then play it every morning. This lets you avoid the monotonous situations, lke reading peoples bumper stickers, and enjoy the good driving times, such as cross country on the open interstate doing 70 mph with the top down.
==Of course, disregard all previous ramblings,==
==as they are due to a positive outlook on life.==
can you guys.... (Score:1)
Pow Pow Power wheels (Score:1)
This is AI (Score:1)
Re:That bitch! (Score:1)
Kids had muscles in your day? (Score:4)
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Further tracking uses: (Score:1)
Ok here's doubt I have had for ages (Score:1)
Re:That bitch! (Score:1)
I remember three- and four-wheel ATV type things and a miniature four-wheel-drive-looking pickup. Used gel-cell batteries that were way expensive. I used to load them up for people when I worked at Wal-Mart.
Fun for profit (Score:4)
Lately, I've been more of the opinion that fun projects have no potential to ever be profitable. Once upon a time, guys (and they were all guys) did interesting things in their garages for grins and later found out they could get rich. The stories of Wozniak, Jobs, Gates, and Torvalds seem like legends of a bygone era -- a rare cosmic convergence of being the right place at the right time doing the right thing.
Clearly, this tracking technology has commercial uses. The rogue hackers in this story can almost certainly expect phone calls from the likes of General Motors, Daimler-Benz, and Kia.
My advice? Get your patents now, fellas.
My favorite part of this story (Score:3)
The bold is my emphasis. This is unbelieveable. Putting aside all technical considerations, these guys actually slept during a project! This could be a serious breakthrough! Maybe now I can point to them and tell my boss, "Hey, they got to go home and sleep, and look at the fantastic job they did with that car. Don't you want those kind of results? Yes? Ok, I'm not working this weekend."
Steven
Barbi's got OnStar (Score:1)
With this system, it looks like Ken might get all Eminem on Barbi's plastic butt when he retraces her car's steps to the poolboy's house.
Photos of Ken ridin' around town w/ Barbi's head in the trunk. [ridiculopathy.com]
Re: (Score:1)
Re:That bitch! (Score:1)
Clueless father: "Does Barbie come with Ken?"
Witty store clerk: "Barbie comes with G.I. Joe; she only fakes it with Ken."
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spam spam spam spam spam spam
No one expects the Spammish Repetition!
Re:What the fuck? (Score:1)
Re:Someone should warn them (Score:1)
O my good (Score:1)
Re:That's great (Score:2)
Steven
Re:Fun for profit (Score:1)
Which one of these 3 doesn't belong?
Useful Hacks... (Score:1)
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Shades of Logo (Score:4)
Neighbor: "What-what the hell was that?"
Me: That was my brother's powerwheel jeep from 1982. One day, he was hit by a car in it. He was killed, but the controls on the thing were broken anddon't work anymore. Now it just sits around. Every morning, it goes just where he used to ride.
Redundancy (Score:1)
How bout you guys stop posting actual HTML links and just put the URL in clear text. That should take care of half the people that would be too lazy to cut and paste.
Re:can you guys.... (Score:2)
Dancin Santa
Parliament Takes Action (Score:1)
Re:That's great (Score:1)
Re:That bitch! (Score:1)
"We'd like to say she comes with her husband, but she doesn't... she does, however, come with Pedro, the pool boy!" - (as best as I remember)excerpt from 'Trophy Wife Barbie'
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Re:Le Plus Ca Change (Was :Fun for profit) (Score:1)
And for that matter, what's Jobs doing in the list at all? The original list was of "technical innovators" which neither Gates nor Jobs is (or was). Gates at least has the distinction of running a highly successful technology company. Whatever you think of Apple, "highly successful" is not really applicable ("limping along" and "fits and starts" both leap to mind).
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Corporate Reaction (Score:2)
Forgive me if this is all addressed on their page - I couldn't get to it.
Re:Corporate Reaction (Score:1)
hack? (Score:2)
You could look up the definition of 'hacking' and go from there. A good defination is at:
http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/jargon/html/entry/hack
Redneck Powerwheels Hack (Score:1)
Perhaps a common language? (Score:1)
However, a while back Slashdot ran a story on hacking barney [slashdot.org], the Actimate by Mattel (and Microsoft). Now I know that they had done something with the Barbie as well (though they mentioned it less), which leads me to believe that the GI Joe vehicle in this story is under a similar structure. Yes, obviously these are different products, but I'd imagine that the partnership between MS and Mattel would be consistent in this respect.
I'm curious how overlapped the work between the two groups were, and if there are any globalized consistencies in Mattel products.
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Other factors (Score:1)
There was more, but I just got a phone call and I lost my train of thought.
Re:can you guys.... (Score:1)
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
Re:Redundancy (Score:1)
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
Now all they need is a hacked Barney to drive it! (Score:2)
If not, check out: http://www.geekchic.com/~jpd/barney [geekchic.com]
The perfect combo would be a hacked Road-Rage Barney screaming profanities out of the GI Joe Jeep.
Re:My favorite part of this story (Score:2)
This is one of the concepts behind XP, is that programmers are more efficient when they work normal hours. "XP defines OverTime as the time spent working that makes a programmer less productive in the long term."
See also: OverTime [c2.com]
College Project (Score:1)
We also added a pan/tilt video camera and a rotatable sonar range-finding device. We wrote programs that would allow us to move the vehicle, turn its wheels, take pictures, range find, etc. We made it so the vehicle was able to be controlled over a LAN, or the internet, and could send pictures back to a graphic analysis program. Combined with a sonar sweep we had a decent "3D" view of the jeep's surroundings.
All this fun, and we got college credit too...
Fucking Retard!!!!!!!! (Score:1)
Don't use HREF tags AT ALL. Instead of posting Slashdot [slashdot.org], post http://www.slashdot.org. See the diff between an HREF tag and plain text. Sorry if "plain text" is too complicated of a topic for you.
Bees (Score:1)
Fisher-Price encouraged this (Score:2)
I'm one of the guys who hacked the CurlyCart. Fisher-Price encouraged this; they dropped off over a dozen toys to the Lab, and then everyone grabbed one, and tried to make it do something cool(er). Unfortunately, due to the New England snowstorm, their reps weren't able to make it to the lunch meeting last Monday when we presented it, but they'll get video :)
BTW, if you look real close next to my hand in the pic programmer shot, you'll see a CueCat as well. DigitalConvergence via WPP dropped those off :) All I've done with that is linked it up to some perl scripts running my personal library.
Practical uses! ;-) (Score:1)
That would so cool to freak out the neighbor kids with, and to teach them to NOT ride in the street!
(Old Power Wheels pulls out of driveway and into street).
Car goes up the block, circles three times, and returns...
Kids Screaming in Terror
Me: Yep, that used to be little Johny's car.
Pause for dramatic effect
He took it out into the street one day to play, and SMACK! He got hit by a car, and it knocked him into that wall over there. At least he died instantly, that's what the doctors said.
Now... Now every year his ghost comes back to ride the car one more time.
privacy (Score:1)
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Slashdotted site (Score:1)
Solution (Score:1)
Problem solved.
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They must not be English majors... (Score:1)
Having to be shorter than 4" really narrows your options.
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Re:Solution AARGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH (Score:2)
Re:Bees (Score:1)
(I know....finding flowers and dancing and such, but I couldn't help myself)
Let Me Know When They Hack A Toilet (Score:2)
How to REALLY get to the site... (Score:2)
And then click on "Curly" on the left menu section.
They've just blocked Direct access to those pages.
If (lastpage_seen=slashdot){
&bugger off;
}
else {
&Let_them_in;
}
Omnibot (Score:1)
--SONET
Re:Other factors (Score:1)
Of course, then we'd have to keep pedestrians off the streets.
Or we need some really advanced optical vision stuff that will render the first technology redundant.
:)
- Ed.
Daimler Benz (Score:1)
fixed (Score:1)
Another hack of the same unit. (Score:1)
A friend and I hacked one of those once and turned it into an RC car. We used a few relays wired to an RC controller taken from a radio shack remote controlled tank to replace the joysticks. It worked great for a long time. Once we once drove it through water so deep that the motors shorted out and smoke poured out of the battery compartment. All of the insulation on the wires running from the battery compartment to the joysticks had fused into one melted mess. And the damn thing STILL worked after we dried it off even though we never bothered to replace the melted wiring.
maru
Re:Fun for profit (Score:1)
As you can see on the barcodes on the side of their 2000 dollar dual page sony trinitron monitor, that's where the work took place, meaning that they could not get a patent themselves, but rather would have to go through a process with the lab, which would then in turn probably license out the technology like they have done so many times in the past.
But remember, it's not just tinkering, but tinkering on MIT's equipment, meaning it's really MIT Media Lab doing the tinkering.
~Patrick (IIRC)
Re:Power Wheels? (Score:1)