Making Christmas decorations dance with Python #FT232H #Python #Hallmark @ahl

Adam Leventhal posts on Medium about a project to reverse engineer the signals between Hallmark “Happy Tappers” toys. When they are connected together, they will dance in unison. He writes:

This was kind of a silly project. If I had known it would end with a bunch of wholesome Christmas decorations dancing along to Lizzo I probably would have done it a long time ago. Here’s the story of how I took some beloved kitsch, a logic analyzer, sed, awk, Google Sheets, Python, an FT232H, some wires, data from a VR game, and a few evenings to make it happen.

Using a logic analyzer, the signals sent from the tappers were decoded. Now how to emit one’s own signals? Andy decided on the inexpensive Adafruit FT232H Breakout and some Python programming.

See the videos below (first, second, third) of the results and details on how in the Medium article. Great work!