Thanks for all of your work and for posting all of your tear down photos. I have searched on and off for years trying to see a teardown and yours was the first I have found. I have a working bird, a remote and a raspberry Pi 2. Do you think that there would be a minimalist hack by using the GPIO pins for IR output. I haven't used the bird for a while but I seem to remember that a lot of things could be programmed (such as recording custom voice commands) via the remote. I wouldn't want much, but powering up from sleep would be a nice feature that I could couple to a proximity sensor. A few custom responses that could be randomly triggered by the Pi would be sufficient for my living room. Thanks for any help or insight that you may offer.
+David Johnson Hi David, The remotes for these things are very rare. When I see them on EBay, they sell for more than the bird! If I could get my hands on one, I'd snag it and pull the programming codes out of it. Then, I could use the original board. I ended up ripping out the board and doing everything via the Raspberry Pi. I set up a remote on it using a spare TV remote I had laying around along with an IR transistor wired to the GPIOs on the Pi. I experimented with a USB microphone to do interaction. That was a good direction. But, I didn't find a small enough mic. I'm betting they're out there. Just haven't looked close enough. Before I put the parrot away for a while, I had a script randomly play different clips through the day. Funny and annoying at the same time! The Pi will boot fine via a timer or you can have a cron job run that does things through out the day. Let me know how your hacking goes!
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Thanks for all of your work and for posting all of your tear down photos.
I have searched on and off for years trying to see a teardown and yours was the first I have found.
I have a working bird, a remote and a raspberry Pi 2.
Do you think that there would be a minimalist hack by using the GPIO pins for IR output.
I haven't used the bird for a while but I seem to remember that a lot of things could be programmed (such as recording custom voice commands) via the remote.
I wouldn't want much, but powering up from sleep would be a nice feature that I could couple to a proximity sensor. A few custom responses that could be randomly triggered by the Pi would be sufficient for my living room.
Thanks for any help or insight that you may offer.
+David Johnson
Hi David,
The remotes for these things are very rare. When I see them on EBay, they sell for more than the bird! If I could get my hands on one, I'd snag it and pull the programming codes out of it. Then, I could use the original board.
I ended up ripping out the board and doing everything via the Raspberry Pi. I set up a remote on it using a spare TV remote I had laying around along with an IR transistor wired to the GPIOs on the Pi.
I experimented with a USB microphone to do interaction. That was a good direction. But, I didn't find a small enough mic. I'm betting they're out there. Just haven't looked close enough.
Before I put the parrot away for a while, I had a script randomly play different clips through the day. Funny and annoying at the same time! The Pi will boot fine via a timer or you can have a cron job run that does things through out the day.
Let me know how your hacking goes!
What software are you using to play back the motor controls in time with the music? (also, what are you using to capture the movements?)