
PRO
jstarne1
USA
Asked
— Edited

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZgQUoEJEdw&feature=youtube_gdata_player
hey I saw this guy in Wal-Mart on posters and immediately thought of the wowwee style toys and ofcourse hacking little dude. Here is a video. I'm sure lots of people will want to get one for their kids and a week later when they get bored it's time for a ezb v4 transplant! the price started as 75 dollars for the holiday season.
Below are a couple photos / diagrams of the board in CHiP's body. There is no UART port, however there are two possible inputs on this board. Take a look. I will take CHiP's head apart and post pictures of what is in there.
I find it interesting that the white circled solder pads on both boards are numbered sequentially starting with the head - P1 thru P4 and in the 2nd board in the dogs body - P5 thru P7.
I have been noodling around with ideas to make EZ-B do this reliably (ie, not following a glyph or color or shape. Some kind of beacon) for ever. Would love to know how they do this and see if it could be duplicated.
Alan
The dog does have BT and WiFi and you can connect to it with an app that you download. The app enables you to control the dog better than the wrist band/watch. It is also more responsive.
This is actually the first commercially robot that I purchased that leverages IR, BT and WiFi.
I found this by searching for "Early Light Industrial Co. Ltd" on FCCID.IO website. Below is the link.
https://fccid.io/OKP0820N/Schematics/Circuit-Diagram-2751406.pdf
Have you looked into using the Pololu IR Beacon for "follow me" ?
www.pololu.com/product/701/
Regards,
Frank
I will now!
I already have the watch as joystick thing down, just not the following me without active control : https://www.ez-robot.com/Community/Forum/Thread?threadId=9125
Alan
I am very hopeful about this mystery port that you pointed out:
This seems like either a UART port or an I2C port. Either of them would likely be useful for hacking. The best way to find out would be to hook up a logic analyzer to the middle two pins and try and decode what's happening while the robot is on. I'm guessing that the 3.28V pin is either the I2C SCL pin or UART TX pin.
Based on my teardown of WowWee CHiP and the detailed circuit diagram that I found on the FCC website that I believe is for this toy dog, I am more convinced that there is a UART port on the larger circuit board that is located in the dog's body. I however lack the hardware and knowledge to go any further in interfacing and confirming this so I have a proposal for you all...
I was able to pick up both control boards - completely wired for CHiP off of eBay. In an effort to hack into and expand this robotic dog's capabilities with EZ-B, I am willing to mail both boards and the battery to someone on this forum to confirm the port, decode and then share findings with this Community.
I tested the boards and they are in working order. It is weird to hear the dog bark and see his eyes light up with no body. My posts above have details on what each wire lead goes to (motors, sensors, eyes, etc.).
Anyone interested and wanting to work on this please let me know. I live in Clarkston, Michigan and will have the boards in the mail ASAP!
Circuit-Diagram-2751406.pdf
That's the wowwee Mip circuit (0820) chip's product number is 0805.
I did some more digging and came up with the following link. It has less to do with CHiP, but it is worth a look at as it contains many internal photos and descriptions for many other WW toys. There is even an FCC filing in 2007 for a variation of something that looks very close to being a Fingerling.
https://fccid.io/OKP
I took apart the main chassis today to look around. I didn't pull the board out yet though.
Once opened, there is a spring that attaches between the waist actuator and the top of what I'm calling the Main Body (this section). It's really the upper abdomen, so maybe we should call it that instead.
Then, I took off the purple plastic panel that protects the motor wires from getting caught in the spring / waist movements to reveal 5 motor drivers, each with ORANGE / RED / BROWN. Can anyone give their best guess on what those motors take in terms of power and what signals the lines are.
I'll attempt to post more as I dive in, but it would be cool if other people here also post what they can find about Zoomer. Apparently there used to be an app? Does the dog have WIFI or Bluetooth? Maybe there's a handy UART interface like CHIP has so hacking is much easier and we don't have to circuit bend...
Cheers,
Patchwork