Excercise 3: Hacking a Toy

(http://i.ebayimg.com/t/Cool-Catfish-Singing-Fish-Like-Big-Mouth-Billy-Bass-/00/s/MTIwMFgxNjAw/z/7OIAAMXQgb1RO6Py/$T2eC16FHJF8E9nnC6MvrBRO6PyY,Pw~~60_35.JPG)

In this exercise, I found a singing fish wall mount. This novelty toy tells very horrible fish puns and it sings as well. It's speech is initiated by a button as well as a photo resistor that can detect movement. When it sings, it activates two motors, one at the head and midsection of the fish. The head motor creates the illusion of mouth movement when the fish speaks like a puppet. The motor at the mid section makes the fish flail. The motor is connected to some gears that puts the entire body in motion. It is covered in a latex fish skin.

When I took it apart, I noticed that the main components were a speaker, a button, a photo resistor, two motors on the fish itself, and a circuit board. My goal was to distort the speech of the fish and to have control over the two motors. I began by using a piece of wire to create alternate connections within the circuit board, in hopes of finding a connection that would distort the speech. My first main issue was the volume of the fish. I was having trouble focusing, and did not want to distract my classmates when the fish began singing. I used alligator clips and added a potentiometer between the junction of the speaker and the circuit board. I used a 10k ohm potentiometer and it succeeded in lowering the volume. I could now focus and search for hotspots on the circuit board.

To my dismay, I did not find anything that sounded interesting on the circuit board and the speaker stopped working, so I began to investigate the motors. I connected each motor to a potentiometer and then to ground on the battery. I first began experimenting with the motor on the mid section. By turning the potentiometer, the motor would turn at different speeds. The same method worked with the other motor at the head. Using one potentiometer I figured out how to control both motors. The left pin controlled the head motor, the middle pin was connected to ground, and the right pin was connected to the mid motor. By turning the potentiometer in different directions, different motors would activate at variable speeds. The motors would also activate when I pushed the button or moved in front of the photo resistor.