How to do talking dog repeat with your own hands. The craft was made specifically for pranks during the New Year. Unfortunately, I haven’t seen any repeat dogs for sale. Walking the already beaten path, the dog repeater was made with my own hands. To do this, you need to purchase only two toys and carry out simple actions on them with your own hands. For details on how to make a talking dog repeater with photos and videos, see the presented master class. As always, the finished toy will be given to the child as a gift in the new year.
To make a Repeater Dog, you need a repeater hamster and a soft toy dog. The master solved this issue by purchasing a hamster on Aliexpress using the link http://ali.pub/q3pti . The dog was bought at a toy store. Price in photo.
Dog toy 
Dog toy Assembly instructions for Repeating Dogs
- We remove the hamster mechanism from the skin. Usually the skin is secured with a cable tie. You just need to cut it off with pliers. You can see how to cut fasteners.
- We check the operation of the mechanism. The mechanism should be stopped in the upper position of the movable platform. Watch a video.
- The selected toy, the Dog, is a little small to fit into the mechanism. Therefore, the lining was ripped open and after removing part of the padding polyester from the head, the upper platform of the mechanism was placed in the head of the toy.
- Excess padding polyester is placed in the dog’s paws to give them volume.
- For clear movement of the toy's head, according to the operation of the mechanism, the top of the head was tied with threads to the mechanism platform.
- A thread was passed along the edge of the toy under the gasket. The thread is stretched and fixes the edge of the skin in the groove of the mechanism. Watch the video.
The mechanism is installed in the extended position 
It’s a pity that it’s impossible to buy a ready-made toy in stores, but you can make it yourself with your own hands. The craft is worth the time investment. The main thing is to put it into action in time when celebrating the New Year and everyone will be guaranteed laughter to tears! And the craft itself is a worthy gift for a child. Children appreciate toys that you won't find among your friends.
Among existing toys, a special position is occupied by those that can speak and respond to touch. Such toys are called interactive.
IN Lately The most popular among girls and boys is the interactive bird Little Live Pets. This toy will be a wonderful gift for a child who dreams of having a pet.
Features of interactive toys
Toys can speak thanks to a special device that is mounted inside the toy body. These blocks differ in functionality:
- the most simple mechanism is a write-once audio module. Playing time can be from 1 to 6.5 minutes;
- more sophisticated devices allow you to re-record melodies or phrases. Interactive toys with such systems learn to speak with the child, constantly increasing lexicon. You can also record fairy tales or songs performed by your mother or other relative;
- There are systems that are activated not by pressing a button on the sound unit, but by voice or touch various parts toys.
For example, an interactive doll starts laughing when you touch its cheek, and if you take it by the hand, it starts talking.
Children different ages love talking toys. By playing with them, kids learn to communicate, gain new knowledge and other skills. The only drawback of interactive toys is their cost. The more functions such a toy performs, the higher its price.
Making a toy yourself
If you want to please your child with a talking toy, you can make it yourself.
A person who is familiar with radio electronics can assemble a programmable sound module at home. But this is not particularly necessary; today such blocks can be purchased on the Internet or in a specialized store.
The process of making a talking toy looks like this:
- We select a toy. It can be store-bought or made independently. Handmade textile toys are very popular today.
- We purchase a music module and record a melody, text or fairy tale on it. You can also take a sound module from any old toy, just check that the batteries are working properly.
- We rip the seam at the place where the block will be installed.
- We place the module inside the toy, and it is important to pay attention to the button, it must be accessible for pressing.
After this, all that remains is to quietly sew up the seam and that’s it - the toy has become talking.
This video will help you learn how to make a talking toy:
There are an incredible number of talking toys for children in the world, and this only deepens the impression that adults are bored. Our team decided to correct this situation.
The beginning of the story
It all started when a bright thought came to the inquisitive mind of one of my friend and netsnail colleague: why not amuse not only children, but also adults with thematic jokes? Fortunately, affordable and well-proven hardware is now no longer a rarity, and it can not only blink lights, but also sing songs.In this regard, he called me and offered to repeat the epic feat to see if the ESP8266 plays music in MP3 format well over the network and whether it’s tearing the hamster to pieces, whether there’s really enough performance, which I quickly did new year holidays 2016:
In the video, the ESP8266 plays Internet radio, outputting sound using the “5-bit PWM over I2S” hack.
However, playing MP3 radio from the Internet consumed almost the entire resource of the ESP8266 and sounded “so-so,” while our imagination was already picturing something more than just an MP3 radio speaker. With these creative impulses, we went to our team and beloved chef Vladimir.
After a little brainstorming, a more detailed picture began to emerge and even logical chain what we not only want, but can also do:
- To replace MP3 with something less resource-demanding and more free, we settled on Speex, which flexxnn quite successfully and quickly ported to the ESP8266.
- Take recordings of jokes from a server in the cloud and store them locally on an SD card, because... The Internet is not available everywhere, and even on the ESP8266, if you keep it on all the time, you won’t get enough battery.
- Tie “jokes of humor” to some events, and not just talk randomly. A smartphone was chosen as the event generator, since almost everyone already has one. Well, the actual events can be easily received from the Apple Notification Center Service (ANCS), which is already available on iPod, iPhone and iPad.
- Use Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) to communicate with a smartphone, because few people will find it fun to charge a toy more than once a week.
- To prevent the toy from annoying the user with frequent jokes about all incoming events, we decided to use logic in a scripting language. We settled on Pawn language.
- Since everyone has different tastes in jokes, and listening to the same joke is already sad, it was decided to give the user the opportunity to vote for jokes by “patting” and “beating” (the accelerometer), in order to form it on the content server next time more relevant playlist.
Hardware selection
Initially, I wanted to make a very simple but fully working prototype on an all-in-one board, so we decided to try it on LinkIt ONE from MediaTek. And netsnail succeeded almost immediately. There was a connection with the phone and MP3s from the SD card were played perfectly.It would seem that this is happiness and a ready-made platform! But then we were faced with the harsh reality of the limitations of their closed SDK and the euphoria passed.
We realized that there was no ready-made platform on one board that would satisfy all our wishes, which meant we had to create it from scratch.
So, we had to select (February 2016) the most suitable BLE chip that needed to be associated with the ESP8266. We decided to use standard TWI (I2C) as a connection between the ESP8266 and the BLE chip (at that time we didn’t know what kind of chip it would be).
But with BLE there wasn’t much choice back then:
- TI CC2541 - somehow I didn’t like it right away because of the architecture, and the 8 KB RAM looked unpromising easy life, given the number of BLE services and characteristics that we required in the toy.
- BCM20732 - looked very promising, but in reality the SDK turned out to be very crude, and the Broadcom WICED Smart BLE hardware is so buggy that I won’t write anything special here, so as not to swear. Let me know if the situation has improved now.
- nRF52832 is the first chip that immediately pleased me. But then there was no compact BLE module - rekod started prototyping on a debug board, I really liked the SDK, it contained many different workers examples. The BLE ANCS example started right away and we immediately saw notifications from the iPhone in the UART logs. By the way, this debug board has a real SEGGER J-Link programmer and debugger, which made our life much easier in the future.
- nRF51822 - at that time there were ready-made modules, and they were programmed via SEGGER from nRF52832. What surprised me most is that the code from the older nRF52832 model is perfectly transferred to the younger nRF51822 and back!
It was very sad to experience glitches due to dupont cables falling off, especially on the nRF51822 module, where the pins are slightly smaller.
BLE services on nRF51822 and iOS application
Nevertheless, affair and I have already started implementing BLE services and characteristics on the nRF51822 on this spider hardware, dividing everything approximately in half:- Apple Notification Center Service (ANCS) - to receive notifications about events from your smartphone.
- Apple Current Time Service (CTS) - when connected, the toy takes time from the phone.
- HandShake Service (HSS) - this service, by the way, makes the toy “impenetrable”, unlike conventional headsets and similar gadgets. The fact is that the cloud has ClientID and the user not only pairs the phone and the toy via Bluetooth, but also an additional binding that is not so easy to reset. A description of this process requires a separate article, so I will limit myself to a brief mention.
- Battery As Service (BAS) - transfer of battery status to a smartphone application.
- Content Service (CONTS) - with this you can see a list of previously played jokes, with text (the text is taken from the server in the cloud).
- Settings Service (SETTS) - with this you can configure filters for inappropriate joke content, the time when the toy should be silent (at night, for example), etc.
The picture on the right shows the main screen of the application.
Here flexxnn could not stand our suffering due to the falling off wires and made the first normal prototype at home using the laser iron method:
It’s not visible in the photo, but there is already a slot for a microSD card. On the small square card below - ALC5627, the sound was already much better than 5-bit PWM via I2S.
For power management we chose AXP209. Allows you to charge and use the battery at the same time, as well as monitor its condition. The chip is very common, but has many specifics both in programming and in the required external components, the so-called. "harness".
Magic on ESP8266
In parallel with this, flexxnn ported Speex, FatFs to ESP8266, made a bootloader for ESP8266 and nRF51822, so that you don’t have to flash updated firmware over the wire, but do it by placing the firmware files on a microSD card.Personally, it seems to me that aliens helped him, since he did it all in about a month. But he does not admit to contacts with alien intelligence.
And then the second, more normal prototype:
But the more normal prototype no longer fit into a soft toy. And even if it did get in, then with a sudden movement a “stranger” would climb out of the toy onto the potential user, which of course was unacceptable for an MVP.
Therefore, it was decided to order the board to professionals and this is what happened in the end:
This design already fits perfectly into a cat, although it looks somehow inhumane:
At the same time, fears were confirmed that events from the phone could come quite often and as a result the user would get irritation instead of fun. A flexible logic for filtering was required, which could be easily changed at any time without re-flashing. In this regard, after studying the hardware and realizing that there are no fast and compact scripts for the ESP8266 (Lua and microPython are interpreters), I decided to port the Pawn language, which quickly (only 18 times slower than the native one) executes compact bytecode.
By the way, the sources on Pawn are very similar to C, so modifying scripts is a pleasure - you just need to compile them into AMX bytecode and copy them to an SD card.
Gadget cheating. Pretending to be iOS on Android
And then “suddenly” we all remembered that Android phones there are not so few, and even more, than iOS phones in the world.As a result, I had to quickly check whether we could trick gadgets and pretend to be iOS on Android, so that they see an ANCS service indistinguishable from Apple.
In the end, everything worked out and within a week the gadgets (and our cat was no exception) sincerely believed that I had an iPhone with ANCS service, connecting to my Nexus 5 and even to the old one Samsung Galaxy with Android 4.4.
Go Cloud
Since no one likes to listen to a joke several times (fact), and there are also preferences and cultural restrictions, it was decided to create a unique playlist for each user. For this affair, I worked closely on a server in the cloud.But how do you decide who will like what? That's right - let the user decide for himself! To do this, I did basic gesture detection on an accelerometer from STMicroelectronics. If you liked the joke, you tilted the cat as if it was “yes.” If you didn’t like the joke, you tilted it to the side as if it was “no.” I also added a “forget-me-not” for the phone - if the BLE connection is lost, and the accelerometer detects movement, it means the cat is being carried somewhere, and the phone has been forgotten.
After the user has “liked” and thereby indicated his preferences, the information goes to the server, where the “genomes” of the playlists are compared and new sets of jokes are generated for the user. But this is a topic for a separate article.
Results
As a result, the entertainment turned out to be an excellent platform that can:- communicate with your phone via BLE and receive notifications about events;
- communicate via WiFi and download content and firmware updates;
- save and read files in FAT32 on microSD;
- play jokes packed with speex codec;
- determine user preferences using an accelerometer (gesture detection);
- create playlists for each user based on their preferences in humor;
With this platform we went to kickstarter, calling the finished toy KiQ. On the first day we collected 40%, and now it’s already 57%. But that's a completely different story.
Thanks to all those who read to this line. I look forward to interesting questions from you.
