Hacking and digital resurrection of a Furby at GitHub Universe 2025

During the second half of 2025, coinciding with the GitHub Universe technology conference, an experiment was made public that attracted the attention of both the technology community and the mainstream media: the reprogramming of a Furby Connect, an electronic toy from Hasbro originally launched in 2016. The project was led by Martin Woodward, a GitHub executive, who documented the process on his personal blog in October of that year. 

Woodward recovered an old Furby whose original software had been abandoned and, using AI assistance tools such as GitHub Copilot, rewrote the Bluetooth protocol that controlled the toy, creating a modern library called PyFluff. This enabled advanced features: control of lights, movements, facial expressions on the LCD screen, execution of hundreds of pre-programmed actions, and reading of internal sensors.

The experiment is considered an illustrative case of AI's potential to modernize and extend the useful life of obsolete hardware. But this leaves the door open to the possible uses that could be given to this type of connected toy, considering the possibilities offered by artificial intelligence.