teddy ruxpin

[paulrevelcet]

Does anyone out there know how the teddy ruxpin bear worked? I know you had to put a cassette in his back, but I just cant figure out how they synced up his movements with the tape, maybe a series of tones on the left channel while the right channel was used for the sound? I would love to be able to use servos and a regular cd player to animate something, there are commercial solutions but way to high for me to try.

[CeaSaR]

You are correct in that one channel is the "control" for the animation while the other channel is the standard audio. Unfortunately, I have no idea what the control was. Funny thing, a friend of the family had one for their child (back in the '80's) and put a heavy metal tape in and pushed play - the mouth and eyes went wide open and froze there! Proof that certain music can damage the "brain" . <p>CeaSaR

[shotgunefx]

Probably the easiest way would to figure it out would be to put one of those "tape adapters" for cars without CD players in it and hook it to the line out of your PC. It should be fairly easy to generate tones into either channel.<p>Update<p>From http://www.mindspring.com/~mathue/workings.html<p>The animation data system used for Teddy and Grubby is much the same as the 8 channel digital proportional system used for model airplanes. There are 9 short pulses in a row, the time gap between successive pulses is the information for each channel.
Channel 1 is not used.
Channel 2,3,4 are Teddy's eyes, upper and lower jaw.
Channel 5 controls if audio comes from Grubby, Teddy or both.
Channel 6,7 and 8 control Grubby's eyes, upper and lower jaw.
The data is recorded 'raw' on the tape, no sub-carrier is used. Because of this, polarity and shape of the signal is important for reliable operation. By modern standards it is quite a crude system, but electronics were less sophisticated in 1985.
Incidentally, Mother Goose, Mickey and Snoopy use a similar system which has 16 channels. The last 8 contain a key code that makes a tape work only in the right toy. A custom decoder chip was used in them that recognizes the 'key'.
The small Teddy Ruxpin uses a single servo, and has only one data channel - I believe it is frequency modulated, I never picked it apart.
---end---<p> T eddy Ruxpin's tape player is actually a stereo player. The prerecorded tapes have animation data recorded along side the audio tracks. The right channel contains the data, the left channel the audio programme. Putting an ordinary tape in Teddy Ruxpin often won't work. There are two reasons for this, one is obvious, the other isn't.
An ordinary cassette tape that wasn't specifically made for Teddy Ruxpin doesn't contain anything that his electronics can decipher as animation data (Or atleast enough to be coordinated). Second the 'spine' of the cassette housing has some additional tabs knocked out (Like very high bias metal tapes) that corresponds to a microswitch trigger. If this switch isn't moved Teddy will not animate.<p>[ April 05, 2004: Message edited by: Shotgun ]</p>

[paulrevelcet]

WOW!thanks alot. Before I spend months trying to figure out how to recreate this, does any one have any suggestions (circuit diagrams) to use tones to control servos? seems like this is going to be another job for a micro controller. <p>Is there any structured courses online that deals with programming chips? I have lots of books but it seems I need a book to explain my book.<p>Oh one more question, can you combine a midi track with some other kind of audio track to have say both? the reason why I ask is in walts article he never says how you can have a singing animatronic using midi, midi cant have words can it? I have cake walk pro audio 9 but like I said I need a book to explain the help file.

[CeaSaR]

Teddy never moved again . Poor little bear. If I recall correctly, the group that killed Teddy was Quiet Riot.

[jwax]

Teddy sounds like he ran much like Robie the Robot, popular in the late '80's.
Robie actually moved around, moved his arms, and talked. You could teach it to move through a certain path, speak at different times, all based on the audio cassette in his chest. You could change the cassette to have him do different tasks (programs). I'd love to find one of them today!
John

[paulrevelcet]

Yea, so would I. <p>Ive been trying to reproduce this effect in a more indirect way, I have a working prototype of a servo controller that moves the servo with sound but I cant figure out how to record the audio on the left channel then come back and in real time as the left channel is playing, record a control tone on the right channel to match up mouth movements with the audio, for example, while the voice is playing, some how have a keyboard configured to make a tone when you hit say the R key, as you listen to the audio, hit the R key in time with the voice, but be recording on the left channel only. <p>This has to be possible, or some variation of this. What Im trying to get away from is recording them separatively, then trying to cut and paste them together, If any body has any ideas, they would be greatly appreciated.