ArduinoMania

In the United States, TV and radio stations have to give the opportunity of equal airtime to all candidates. In that spirit, we thought we should show you [Jayden17’s] hack that puts Google Assistant into a Teddy Ruxpin. You can see the hacked bear do its thing in the video below.

Teddy was the best-selling toy for 1985 and 1986, and is still available, so over 30 years there are a lot of these hanging around. If you never looked at how they work, the original ones were quite simple. A cassette player routed one stereo channel to a speaker and used the other channel to control servo motors to move the mouth and eyes. The cassette was eventually replaced with a digital cartridge, and newer versions of Teddy only use two motors instead of the three in the original.

[Jayden17’s] bear was an original “Worlds of Wonder” bear which means it is from the 1985-1990 time period. If you have a newer bear, you might have to work things out a little differently. These bears often have stuck motors, which can be fixed and broken cassette mechanisms. The cassette isn’t used with this project, so that’s not a problem.

The real key to the project is an Arduino that listens to the audio coming in from a smartphone or other source and drives the motors. The project just uses a cable for the phone, although we would have been tempted to put a cheap Bluetooth receiver in there. However, because of the way it is set up, you could easily do that. You could also use a Raspberry Pi or even switch to Alexa. The Arduino doesn’t know anything about the source audio.