Going crazy - How does this device work?

When I was a evil sinner I was a technician at PC world during the time when Microsoft's Barney was being released. As an aside, it is possible to induce an unrecoverable fit in Barney by pressed all his limbs at once and flashing your hand in fron of his eyes but that's Microsoft for you. It's quite heart-wrenching to watch his little purple arms shiver as he wordlessly mouths for his life...

Every time a kid came into the store they would make a beeline for Barney and start him singing his song and thoroughly irritataing the sales team who would periodically break him. The technicians would then be tasked with fixing him (and trying to increase his volume) and very soon it spiralled out of control and ever more viscious ways of slaughtering Barney were attempted requiring ever more serious repairs. This included barney being nailed to a wall with a screwdriver through his eye.

Barney eventually met his demise as a head-first blockage in one of the staff toilets following a recent "fix" which made him sing his song endlessly and loudly. Poor little fella couldn't swim apparently.

Ooh, this makes me think of the most woundrous 'last poses' of many Furby's i've seen.

I would think that touching a metal object would produce a fairly rapid change in capacitance over time compared to inserting your hand, which ought to be detectable.

Any of note? Google has drawn up a depressing lack of results. There's definitely a website in this - after all cat-scan.com (now sadly defunct) managed to draw an incredible number of hits.

"Tom Lucas" wrote in message news: snipped-for-privacy@iris.uk.clara.net...

(Furby fails high voltage test).

Oh that's better than p0rn :-)

I am not aware of any public 'furby destruction' sites, although sites like youtube and google video seem to have a lot of footage on these subjects. Especially the microwave seems a popular way to mute the endless babbling.

In case you are interested, the remains of the furby which once lived at our office are still in use these days:

Microwaves are so unimaginative though - any fool can nuke a furby. However, it is taken to another level once Tesla coils get involved :->

Marvellous. Also a highly useful tactic for explaining the disappearance of a noisy furby to a small child. "Well you showed it your Tonka truck and it got ideas..."

Here at work it is blocked, so I guess the PTB consider it about the same as p*rn!

I'm thinking this may be close. When you touch something metal, your body is in good contact with easy sources of oscillating electrons which can then travel via your body as an antenna and here's the key thing: bringing those oscillation energies outside the box. This brings to mind a fluxgate magnetometer. Each metal part inside the box is almost like a 'bell', ringing and reemitting energy inside the box in response to the magnetic field oscillations. But those must sum to zero when they occur within the interior of a pickup coil, no matter what the interior position of the metal happens to be. But if some of the induced energy can be made to leave that interior through your body, then the sum is no longer zero and can be detected.

But frankly, this is more up to you folks. I'm just a hobbist.

Jon

More likely the delta change caused by finger to metal contact - capacitance or ac hum being the determinant.

I hadn't heard of that one and I have all of the 'hacking Barney' resources that were released from the 'sweatpea' project (see ACM CHI '99). Too bad the authors wouldn't release all of their findings and the 'Barney Protocol Stack'.

Regards,

Michael

You need some accomplices who can repeatedly squeeze the feet and hands while you flick your hands in front of his eyes. Presumably it was thought that one child couldn't create that amount of input data at once and the software doesn't like it when it happens.

Once the fit is induced (and it doesn't always happen) then Barney shivers at a faily high rate but doesn't move far. Perhaps our Barney had an earlier cut of code and the bug was fixed later.

How did anyone ever discover this? I think there are way too many people with too much time on their hands.

Here, we call them "Quality Assurance testers".

I wonder if the same trick works on people in Barney costumes? I'll have to try it.

You didn't know this?

A club, or a 357 works, in a pinch.