FYI: McDonald's Avatar Happy Meal Toys Circuit

No_6 · Post by **No_6** » Sat Nov 19, 2011 10:03 pm

As many of you know, the Avatar toys have a small chip in them. Almost all of them have a sound/vibration sensor connected to a small, programmed chip. The larger toys (the animals) have 2-3 LEDs in them (not sure as I haven't pulled these open yet), while the figures have a single LED.

Well, I was wondering how robust these circuits were to use to future builds. How many mA can they take? So I took one of the boards out of a Jake Sully and connected it one of my regulated 1000mA wall-warts and set it to 3 watts. I then wired 8 amber LEDs to it in parallel and let it fly. I didn't test it long, under a minute, but it seemed to hold up just fine. No smoking or burning.

If anyone is interested, I will do a longer test, say 5 minutes after the holidays and will post up pictures and maybe even a video.

Mr. Engineer · Post by **Mr. Engineer** » Sun Nov 20, 2011 1:49 am

Whoa! 3watts is a lot!

Anyway, in this case, its the voltage. How many batteries are there? It might help if you could take extremely clear hi-res photos of the circuit board (top & bottom)

No_6 · Post by **No_6** » Mon Nov 21, 2011 2:45 pm

Whupps, sorry, yeah. 3 volts. Each toy takes 3 small watch batteries.

Maschinen Krueger · Post by **Maschinen Krueger** » Fri Mar 09, 2012 12:29 pm

along the vein of getting toys to do the work for you...

I had an old talking Napoleon Dynamite plush doll. I never wanted it in the first place, but he is way past current so I had no issue with gutting him for the electronics. I only wanted the battery pack inside but kept the functioning electronics intact. There was a pack with a small board and and 3AAA cells. From this a pair or wires ran to a circuit with a momentary switch and another pair ran to the speaker.

Just to see what happens, I chopped off the speaker and attached an LED. When I pushed the momentary switch, it ran the program but instead of "Vote for Pedro" and "Sweet" it pulsed the LED with a random/flickering repeating pattern.

Change the momentary for an ON/OFF, and you got a flickering fire or welding sparks.

Pretty cool for free.