Fisher Price Spike the Ultra Dinosaur

[jtzemp2]

Hey, all.

So I wanted to hack some toys and I headed down to the local Savers. For about $7 I picked up one of these: http://www.fisher-price.com/fp.aspx?st=7...&pid=45246

It seems filled with cool components.

I've got some plans for it, but first I wanna see if I can reverse-engineer the IR remote protocol so I can make a new remote as it didn't come with one. My kids want to play with it, so I thought it'd be cool if I let them play with it for a few days before I disassemble it and part it out or see if I can somehow replace the voice chip contents with something different. I dunno... there's a ton of stuff you can do with a walking, talking robot dinosaur.

Anyway, I don't know much about IR remotes other than they flash IR LEDs. I was thinking I could reverse engineer the protocol by hooking my Arduino up to my computer and having my computer to blink an IR LED at the thing in patterns. I can write a program that will just go through combinations until it does something and then I can write down when it hits a meaningful combo.

Before I go the brute force route, I was wondering if any of you might have one of the remotes and would be willing to bring it to a Make:Provo night so I could 'train' my Arduino.

Thanks!