Fun with MBED, or Big Mouth Billy Bass Gets a Brain Transplant

The video really does speak for itself, as hilarious as it is. I mean, the way he’s in-time with the audio and the voices is fantastic, but this is what happens when you give us geeks some toys, a bread-board, and some free time. Here’s the description from the video, written by the poster, user steveravet:

MBED is a low cost, low barrier to entry ARM based microcontroller development platform. No software, no dongles, no licenses, no ICE. All you need is a USB cable and an internet browser. The C++ development environment is hosted online. To test your firmware you drag and drop the .bin file onto the MBED device and it’s installed and ready to go.

In this video I’ve used MBED to give my Big Mouth Billy Bass (BMBB) a brain transplant. He used to sing and dance along to Bobby McFerrin (“Don’t worry be happy”) and a cover of the Talking Heads (“Take me to the river”). Pretty entertaining, but what if you could download new audio clips and new movements? What if BMBB could get his new songs and choreography from a microSD card?

MBED provides C++ libraries to interface to all of the microcontroller features (A/D, D/A, timers, digital I/O, PWM, etc.) and made it a snap to write a .wav file player to play the sound and use the PWM outputs to control the motion.

Enjoy the video, and go to http://mbed.org to learn more about MBED.

Seriously, if anyone needed inspiration to get them into soldering and circuits? Here you go!

[ YouTube :: Fun with MBED ]

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