Hacker News Reader

Comment by mingus88 | Hacker News Reader

Toys making noise when nobody is around to play with them is a pretty common “ghost” encounter. We had one ourselves with a Sesame Street Ernie doll that would randomly say “I feel great” in an empty room , in the middle of the night, etc. caught it on video once triggering with the doll just lying on the floor.

Turns out when battery voltage gets low (but not yet dead) this can happen in a circuit. I swapped out the batteries and our ghost never came back. Not surprised to hear it happening in a store where stock just sits there for a long time.

Pretty creepy though to hear that when you are lying in bed

View on HN

I was in the house a couple of weeks ago when I kept hearing a voice coming from upstairs every so often I couldn't track down because it never happened when I was up there.

I had forgotten my son bought the Nintendo Talking Flower: https://www.nintendo.com/au/products/talking-flower/ Usually his door is closed when he leaves but that day it had been left open.

Which is to say, nowadays we have some toys that spontaneously speak in the middle of the day with no input too, by design. It didn't "freak me out" or anything, it was clearly an electronic sound from a speaker. Did make me ponder the idea of leaving some sort of speaker with a software-defined-radio wired into the mains so I could do a drive by of my old house a few years later and start transmitting things into it around Halloween or something, though.

One wonders, how the engagement economy will transfer the talking toy industry. A/B testing has confirmed that screaming "Fire!" or yelling "Everybody on the floor, this is a robbery!" - creates instantanious engagement and is thus superior to classic toys engagement.

Strongly recommend the short novel Kentukis by Samanta Schweblin!

The best part is those older toys with low batteries would have an extra creep to the voice because of the low voltage. We had one that sounded absolutely possessed by a devil. It was truly terrifying to hear that in the middle of the night :-D

This effect still happens with cheap battery-powered cat toys that chirp. Some are rechargeable... others are not, and keep squawking pixelated noises of various pitches for years on end. Ask me how I know.

Good for circuit bending! I miss the times when just a resistor or bat voltage controlled the chips clock cycle without insta-crash

Doubly so if they were motorized toys, so when the motors kicked in, the battery voltage would droop and make the pitch shift even more...

It is not uncommon to for some guitarists to use partially depleted batteries to power certain effect pedals, especially fuzz pedals. People can get particular about tracking down specific brands of carbon-zinc type batteries that are perceived to have preferred discharge characteristics. And there are “battery sag simulator” pedals.

https://danelectro.com/product/1960s-vintage-battery/

https://jhspedals.info/products/volture?srsltid=AU7gw4VF4W_4...

Bass players too!

At least that's the story I've read online a few times about the bass sound on Sir Psycho Sexy having to do with the dying battery on the pedal.

And, of course, just a little bit before DSP and simulators become available (or feasible for mainstream availability), those of us who were playing as teenagers in the 90s often got weird sounds on account of trying to juice the last bit of the batteries in our pedals. I love it that some among the current generation of kids like to simulate tape hiss, dying batteries, and other things we'd suffer then :)

One of my son's old toys is up in some box in the attic. Whenever I go up there, about one in three times it says, "The lions says 'Roar'", when I'm walking back down the attic stairs. I don't know why that is what trips it, as walking up them doesn't seem to, and I don't know what box it is in and can't be bothered to look for it the pull the batteries out. It's been doing that for years, as he's in college now.

I know that one. It’s a simple wood puzzle that uses sensors under the pieces shaped like animals.

I had something similar happen to me as a kid with a furby, as if they weren't creepy enough normally.

I remember waking up as a kid to the sound of "Me scared!" because our Furby had fallen off the bed as I drifted to sleep. It's one of the audio clips the Furby plays when it is placed upside down.

At the time: ME ALSO SCARED.

If I manufactured toys I'd definitely make 1 in 10,000 toys randomly go off just to mess with people.

You might like the story of the Evil Stick: https://www.mentalfloss.com/fun/toys/evilstick-gruesome-toy-...

Wow, nostalgia. I have heard that same "I feel great" Ernie line a thousand times.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com