A Furby is basically a robotic stuffed animal toy. Introduced in 1998, it became an instant hit, sparking long queues of waiting fans at toy stores. The basic idea was that your Furby would start out speaking only a few words, and that you could "teach" it more words. In reality, it just followed a standard program that progressively enabled more actions, but there was always a lot of interaction: Furby could respond to being petted, being fed (by sticking your finger in its beak), light and darkness, sound, and position. Furbys could also communicate with each other through an infrared port located between their eyes, so they could play games or sing songs together.

Here is a Furby sitting on my desk. This happens to be a grey one, but you could get them in many different colours.



This is what's left if you take the fur off a Furby. Not much really :-)



Furby's back contains all the cogs and levers that make it move. The main circuit board is located at the bottom. You can also see the sensors, connected to the circuit board with cables and connectors.



This is the main circuit board. The gold-coloured thing on the right is the tilt sensor, that tells Furby whether it's upside down or right side up. The big LM324 in the middle, taking up much of the board space, is a very common chip containing four opamps. It's probably used to interface with Furby's sensors. The square chip behind the red-and-black wires is an EEPROM chip, which I guess is used to store Furby's state of maturity.



The most interesting chips are located on the two small daughter boards at the upper right side: the CPU and the speech synthesizer. The large one shown here is the CPU, the chip that really implements Furby's brain.