How to animate Teddy Ruxpin with a Casio Keyboard

Without altering your toy or knowing anything about electronics, you can animate your Teddy Ruxpin and do some pretty fun stuff. Let me show you how!

[@Tomsonic41]

I had some success with a free signal generator app for the iPhone. Once you've found the right start frequency by playing one of Teddy's tapes, you can set the frequency of the signal generator and play that into Teddy, then simply move the slider up and down to open his mouth or blink his eyes - which is probably how the signal on the tapes was generated in the first place!

[@anthonywhite2502]

Wow really?

[@paige.plague3672]

I love how he's like, lets zoom in on this, and he just brings the cassette player and camera closer together 😂

[@databits]

I have excellent technique. Thank you!

[@paige.plague3672]

databits haha, 😐

[@grassulo]

I did a similar thing as a joke ages ago with a cassette adapter and FL Studio! The robot motors respond to sine waves on one track and the audio is on the opposite stereo track...use your imagination about what I made him say but it was funny, they were an awesome toy and I still have mine (tan vest from the 1980's) he's needed some work over the years but still runs, and is a really good toy to teach about robotics.

[@databits]

grassulo Thanks for the comments!

[@tonks78]

grassulo When I worked at my 80s mall job I saw a kid sitting with Teddy and I put Zeppelin's "Zoso" cassette with "Black Dog" and the kid and her mom CRACKED up as Teddy tried sing "say hey momma see the way you move...."

[@PikachuReesesPieces]

ChiTown Momma how did teddy try to sing it

[@RatArmyHeart]

grassulo Do you know where I can get the original? I actually want one and I'm only 11 lol.

[@JoCox4048]

User 27 eBay is a good way to get an original. I’m 12 and I have a pretty good collection of TR stuff. (With my mom’s permission of course.) :)

[@rileyshumaker8344]

In a haunted house, someone could hide behind a curtain and do this, and sync it up with scary voices

[@zetametallic]

I like it "scary voices" 😂

[@khoufuk]

This inspired me to try it, and I've begun editing sine waves in Audacity. For anyone curious, basically between 1000-3000 hertz as sine waves is what controls Yes! Teddy.

[@khoufuk]

@Honest Abe There was no Grubby produced by Yes! Entertainment, so no, it will not work with Grubby. It only works with the Teddy Ruxpin produced by Yes! Entertainment.

[@ll-Hedgehog1k-ll]

I like how the mouth moves up and down so you can make your own voice of this toy

[@bjmajor]

Wonderful, really enjoyed this! Thank you so much for showing how it's done. There are actually more than 4 versions of TR, though: 3 different revisions of the original Worlds of Wonder TR (1985-1990); the Playschool TR (1991-1996), the Yes! TR (1998-99), the Backpack Toys TR (2005-2010) & the current (horrible) version of TR from Wicked Cool Toys (2017-present).

[@dayuhanspace]

you made a good teddy ruxpin impression!

[@dianagraziano6680]

CAN I PROGRAM SERVOS LIKE THIS? I MAKE MY OWN ANIMATRONIC TOYS.BUT I CAN'T FIGURE OUT HOW TO MOVE ALL THE SERVOS TO A SOUND TRACK.PLEASE LET ME KNOW HOW I CAN DO IT.THANK YOU.

[@sirMAXX77]

I had that keyboard way back when. It was a pretty good keyboard.

[@CassetteMaster]

This is freaking awesome!

[@burtgaming5857]

Well It could work on the 1985 teddy. Here's why Because back then there was a toy called grubby and you had to get a cord to connect teddy to grubby So it could work on the 1985 one. I don't have a keyboard. But I have an iPad. So what I'm saying is you can put the cassette adaptor in the spot where you connect grubby to teddy. I'll try it with my 1985 one. I'm actually planning on getting a 1990s teddy. So I will try this.

[@zewallflower9732]

wow this is so fascinating

[@Quad8track]

Dude! You cracked the Teddy Ruxpin code!

[@makkypak415]

I might try this since I have the same teddy model, does the cassette keep the programmed movements?

[@TheWASHINGMACHINEBOY]

it is easier to make a tape for a talking T.T. bear (a knockoff of teddy ruxpin) because his eyes just open and close continuously and his mouth and nose move when he says sounds that are loud enough to be considered speech to him

[@plateshutoverlock]

But where is the fun in that? Harnessing the power of the unique control tones is way more exciting!

[@TheWASHINGMACHINEBOY]

yeah it is, but it is complicated

[@van4195]

THIS IS SO COOL THANK YOU

[@WizardClipAudio]

If you or anyone, who reads this comment are interested, I'm doing a whole series of related videos about how to 'hack'/interface with Teddy Ruxpin, without having to compromise the integrity of his original hardware, and how to modify and program new cassette tapes for Teddy Ruxpin. It really,..much of it, more or less applies to any of the related World's of Wonder animated talking dolls. I have a couple up already from over a year ago, and am presently recording the first of a myriad of methods to program new content for the toy, and should be up, by next weekend. Other Videos will be more related to experiments with interfacing AI software with unmodified WoW Teddy Ruxpin hardware with peripheral devices.

[@robertrichard7391]

Wow ! Super .... Love it !

[@BetamaxFlippy]

A clean sinewave will do best right?

[@HarryScanlan]

Do you know what FREQ these are exactly ? I'm trying to mimic this with a computer

[@Flatworldfilms]

Awesome!

[@databits]

Ryan Bomar Thanks Ryan!

[@plateshutoverlock]

I'm assuming this 90s TR plays only standard TR tapes properly and does not use the sensing holes between the write protect holes that the 80s tapes had that enabled that one to switch between audio/control-track and audio/audio with voice frequency lip sync. This would likely work in an 80s Teddy Ruxpin as well, provided you put those holes in the cassette adaptor or bypass the sensing mechanism so it always thinks there is a TR tape inside. If you have the other two dolls that connected to TR, you could control those too with a different set of tones.

[@pseydtonne]

You just solved another of my problems from my teardown of a 1985 Ruxpin. Thank you so much for this comment! FYI: I'm taking out the cassette deck and setting it aside. I'm not cutting any wires either, so I can put it back to like-new in the future. I am using the original control board with its lovely Texas Instruments servo control chips to make the Ruxpin into a Bluetooth reader.

[@Lachlant1984]

You actually don't need to use a cassette shell adaptor with this version of Teddy Ruxpin to connect external audio devices to him, just use a stereo cable and connect it to the Teddy Cable Port on the back of Teddy Ruxpin. You'll still need to put Teddy into play mode though.

[@makkypak415]

Lachlant1984 cable port? Where is that on teddy?

[@mspenrice]

I think I saw one near to the play button...

[@robot797]

i wish i had 5 teddy ruxpins i would animate the boheimian rapsody with it :P

[@hainkm]

The WOW Ruxpin's animation track was basically the same as an old RC airplane. It consists of 9 bits recorded raw to the tape. There is no AGC in the board, so it is amazing it even worked!

[@databits]

Kristoffer Hain That's great info!

[@hainkm]

I recently restored one and converted the cassettes to work with an iPod for my 21 month old daughter. Very, very fussy system....but when it works, it works fantastic. One advantage of the older 9bit system from this was the ability to use the servos in proportion. You can open the mouth any percentage if needed. Neat stuff, especially for 85.

[@denzel387]

databits oh cool man :)

[@WasabiKitCat]

***** Why must you read my mind! That would be beautiful! I might buy 5 Teddy Ruxpins and that keyboard just to do that.

[@vegavgf0369]

I want one of these Casios - preferably the VL-1 and the SK-1

[@fabianswebworld]

Actually, with the Yes! version of Teddy Ruxpin (the one you appear to have there), you don't even need the cassette adaptor. The Teddy Ruxpin features a "Teddy Cable port" to the lower left corner (between battery compartment and cassette deck), which is just a normal 3,5mm stereo jack. ;)

[@np02058]

So... add audio from the exercist to teddy?

[@turkeyplague]

So what's the reason this won't work on a version 1 teddy? Is it because he uses specific sound cues to animate (I've heard them; they're horrible), or because these sounds are stored in channels 2/3/4 of the tape, or both? He apparently detects if he's using a teddy tape or a regular cassette and doesn't try to animate if it's a regular cassette, so could this also be the problem? Assuming you could recreate the sounds that the original teddy uses, is there any way to play them through a computer to a specific channel on the adapter tape? Or will it always get blasted through all four channels?

[@plateshutoverlock]

Internally, this likely works exactly the same as an 80s Teddy Ruxpin, tone frequencies and all, except that the extra set of pins that sensed whether you were playing an actual TR tape are missing and the circuit is wired so the toy thinks there is a TR tape inside regardless of what is actually put in there*. You can confirm if this is the case by playing an 80s TR tape inside this TR and seeing if it moves properly. *It's obvious from the design of this TR that it's not ment to be used as a general purpose tape player while the 80s version was.

[@spasticpug5209]

I’ve been trying to find out how cassettes control animatronics That sort of stuff fascinates me but there’s not much info on it

[@Brand008]

I have keyboard I have a bear, uh, keyboard bear

[@databits]

Pure genius.

[@gab_v250]

Teddy Ruxpin keyboard bear UH *_Teddy Ruxpin Keyboard Bear_*

[@TheWASHINGMACHINEBOY]

keybear lol

[@josephrivera2455]

Very cool!!!!!!!!!!😀😀👏👏👏👏👏

[@databits]

Thank you!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[@SkyGameZZZZ]

When I use those things in cassettes I just put in in and don't worry about it

[@KOZYKONDO]

Could I use a computer keyboard? ouo

[@Wolfsheim23]

need to see some hacks of t he new one. My daughter just got one. I miss the days of playing a queen 8 Track Tape on my old Teddy Ruxpin. Should be a way to get .wav or .mp3 on the new one.

[@dnb5661]

I used to have the old digital Teddy Ruxpin.

[@brandonreina5461]

Wicked Cool Toys also released a brand new Teddy Ruxpin with Android capabilities

[@chrislane4637]

What's the model number of the keyboard that you were using in this video

[@pseydtonne]

Realistic Concertmate-650, which was the Radio Shack rebrand of the Casio SK-5. I had the SK-5 as a kid. It let you record up to 4 0.7-second samples or 2 1.4-second samples. Then the orange pads would act as triggers even if you weren't using a sample as your keyboard tone. When you cleared the samples, you got these default tones of a fake lion roar and so forth. You can hear the lion roar at the end of De La Soul's "Ghetto Thang" (kzbin.info/www/bejne/opDHlK2JmJyJm7M).

[@quazarentertainment4901]

what happens if you use a normal piano sound would it still work?

[@databits]

I tried all of the sounds on the keyboard and the one I mentioned worked the best.

[@quazarentertainment4901]

oh ok thanks!

[@quazarentertainment4901]

do you recommend a certain app for doing this?

[@databits]

I don't, haven't tried any apps

[@meldoy39]

Db of a great 💡 is for you for your faithfulness in your opinion of a lady of your choice of a mother 👅👅👅🙍🏼🙍🏼‍♂️🙍🏼‍♂️💋💄

[@ThomasIsBig]

You actually only need an aux cord to do it, you don't even have to have that weird cassette

[@frankowalker4662]

Audacity for PC would do this perfectly.

[@wrestlingfigstagedesigns]

Does this only work on the Yes! version?

[@databits]

I believe it will work on any version after the 1980s model. There was a cassette and a cartridge model from the 90s.

[@gilbertpena7567]

could you please tell me what you do to do that

[@mitchelldries6628]

uhhh what are you doing on youtube if you're not actually watching videos?

[@garry12gg]

I wonder if the tones are the same for the Worlds of Wonder Teddy?

[@databits]

***** No, they are not.

[@denzel387]

***** that is a 1990's model of Teddy Ruxpin

[@denzel387]

***** the Worlds of Wonder Teddy Ruxpin was made in the 80's

[@garry12gg]

***** LOL!

[@denzel387]

im right mate that teddy ruxpin is was made by yes

[@jasonthewiczman5442]

Animated Teddy rubskin that way they could easily be modified and plugged into a stereo amplifier use FM radio to animate teddy

[@plateshutoverlock]

There were toy robots in the 1980s that could be "programmed" to move and the instructions stored on cassette tapes. You could also make them say unimaginitive bullshit like "Take me to your leader" and that was recorded on the tape as well. Despite being more expensive, they ran on tones like TR, and didn't even put the tones and spoken words onto seperate tracks. So playing any kind of audio tape often caused these robots to jerk around in a semi random manner. The remotes didn't use seperate frequencies for voice/control tones either nor did they have any kind of filtering for the microphone. The only tone filtering used was on the speaker. Imagine my surprise when I talked into my friend's Robie Sr. remote microphone and the robot began jerking around for no apparent reason as it interpreted the sound of my voice as control tones

[@stephen12593]

do you think this would work with the worlds of wonder mickey?

[@databits]

This would not work with any WoW talking toy.

[@NewDawnFades1405]

+databits but the Teddy ruxpin is wow right? Well the ones I've seen are...

[@databits]

+Faith Lambourne - this process only works with the Playskool and Yes! Versions.

[@tdickensheets]

WOW Teddy Ruxpin 1985-90

[@larrytgroce2219]

Can you do a video of you making a tape like this

[@databits]

Larry TGroce Hope to soon.

[@larrytgroce2219]

Great Thanks

[@databits]

+Larry TGroce - sorry I forgot about this project, still interested?

[@koosjealberts]

i am very interested!

[@khoufuk]

I might have access to a compatible keyboard! This is so cool. Too bad TV Teddy's mouth isn't nearly as sophisticated, bet you can't hack a TV Teddy as easily.

[@plateshutoverlock]

Back in the early 90s, there was a Wheel Of Fortune LCD handheld that enabled you to "play along" with the show. It worked by using a lens pointed at the TV screen and digital information was encoded into the picture as a series of pixels that most people wouldn't notice and the toy responded to that information. It actually worked a lot like the NES Zapper gun, being able to "see" with only a photocell and not a camera, and it was very timing dependent as well so it likely wouldn't work with modern LCD TVs which messes up these signals through post processing, compression, etc. Anyway, I suspect TV Teddy worked exactly the same way, and might have been designed by the same people who created the electronic Wheel of Fortune game. Unless you know the format of the encoded data, and have a CRT monitor to play it back in the right format AND timing, your chances of doing what you want are just about none. It would be far easier to just wire a microcontroller to those motors and write some custom software.

[@khoufuk]

@@plateshutoverlock That toy sounds interesting! The reason I say TV Teddy is harder to control is that, according to what I've read, the command for his mouth is just "move", not "open" or "be this far open" like Ruxpin. His mouth doesn't sync with his voice, it just flaps while he's talking. So you'd have to time your speech with his mouth flaps, even if you cut the signal short to do slower mouth flaps.

[@plateshutoverlock]

(I only have very vague memories of the TV Teddy commercials so I wasn't aware of the transmitter it used and assumed it was the same as WOF) Likely the format for the Wheel of Fortune game went something like this: [START][ID][PAGE][DATA][CRC/STOP] - Start: "Yes, this is the "data" area of the screen!" - Page - this is the "page number" of the data being sent to the device*. A video frame contains one page. - ID - this ensures that the "pages" all belong to the same "book" (ID) - Data - the actual data the device uses to "play along with the show" - Crc/stop - tells the device that the remaining pixels in the frame is a normal TV picture and to ignore them. Also checks to make sure the id, page, and data is correct (in case something in the normal picture just happens to match the "start" signal) by doing a CRC check on the data and comparing the result to this number. All of the pages would repeat several times on the screen and rejected pages (those that fail the CRC check) would be 'rescanned' by the unit and loaded if they pass. When all this is done, and if all of the "pages" to the data "book" are there and complete, the game performs it's function. *A standard NTSC TV picture would have 30 "pages" of data a second. This has the benefit of keeping the physical area on the screen that those 'special' pixels used small by dividing up the data into smaller chunks and thus almost unoticeable to viewers. These devices were also timed exactly to the beam sweep used to create a TV picture in the analog days (with no post processing, lossy compression, or frame buffering) so this is why modern sets foul up these signals. ## Believe it or not, the Wheel of Fortune game didn't have an actual camera in it. Rather it had a simple photo cell and a type of lens that made it see the screen as if there was a big stationary flickering dot on the screen,. Humans see this flickering dot too, except that that dot is tiny and moving and flickering so fast that persistence of vision causes our eyes to see it as an actual picture. The device looked for a specific pattern in that "flickering dot" to determine if it's data that the device is supposed to process. The NES Zapper worked on a simaler principle but used a different lens and a connection to the NES to determine if you were aiming at a valid target.

[@djsuniversedjbennett]

Can you try grubby

[@niko1u426]

Don´t let look mum no computer see this

[@jamesb8305]

I figured out how Teddy's animations worked 30 years ago when I put a tape in a stereo boombox.

[@turkeyplague]

Guessing that didn't sound great?

[@wyokaiju992]

Well now im going to make a ruxpin sing something by FFDP...

[@sheslostcontrol24]

For pranking Dr. Venture.

[@liimiinall]

Will it work with the Bacpack Toys version?

[@melissamcd]

probably

[@theannoyedmrfloyd3998]

Classic tone decoding here.

[@ThomasFarquhar2]

What about the worlds of wonders teddy ruxpin

[@databits]

Different encoding system.

[@plateshutoverlock]

Wow. I assumed this was the exact same system, but with obvious cost cutting measures such as removing the sensing pins so the toy always assumes that a TR tape is being used and so forth. :-\

[@tdickensheets]

Yes! Ent

[@jackelynnewton7195]

Thomas Dickensheets hhh&?,

[@coondogtheman]

I would probably just hook him to my phone and play music on him. maybe put on some 50 cent or eminem and watch teddy rap. or have him sing good vibrations by marky mark and the funky bunch.

[@pancudowny]

No!... Make a heavy-metal track to play on him! AC/DC would be interesting....

[@jenthompson9421]

Can you please

[@melindablackwell6968]

Jen Thompson what do you mean

[@melindablackwell6968]

I am confused

[@clamshell6863]

I hate that Teddy Ruxpin's costume. That was the only thing that bothered me about this edition.

[@databits]

Agree. It's too much like a McDonalds color scheme.

[@jt6924]

It's Confess A Bear!

[@paige.plague3672]

Justin Tu FEW WILL UNDERATAND

[@massiveaction6217]

🤔 ❓️ 🤷‍♂️

[@colincummings2306]

poooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooppy

[@SCP--bi7do]

K K

[@gmm7650]

Cringe Starts At 7:14

[@databits]

Mine starts at 0:01