The Chatbird-Bot driver is a Linux kernel driver for the Mitsumi PC Mascot.
I got this weird USB gadget in what must have been 2002. It could read your e-mails and annoyingly flap its wings while doing so. In 2018 I rediscovered this gadget in the attic and thought that this might make a good project to learn something about USB and Linux kernel drivers.
Unfortunately, it is nearly impossible to find anything about this device anymore on the internet. Thankfully, I still had kept the original driver CD containing drivers that only ran in Windows XP. After spinning up a VM and Wireshark an, I managed to record the USB request blocks to make the bird flap its wings, and how it transmitted the audio.
With the help of Matthias Vallentin's blog post about writing a linux kernel driver for an USB missile launcher, I managed to write this driver.
The driver exposes the device as a char device. Using ioctl it is possible to send it commands, for instance, to make it flap its wings and to move its beak. Through a lucky guess, I figured out that to use it as a speaker, it is enough to pipe audio formatted as PCM to the char device.
I also wrote a simple bot for Telegram that will read out messages sent to the device, while flapping its wings. The text is transformed into audio using Google's gTTS module. If the message ends with a question mark, the bird will also tilt its head after reading the message aloud. Perfect to annoy your co-workers! :)
Compile (make sure to have your kernel headers installed):
make
Load the driver using the provided script:
./load_and_reset.sh
Loading the driver could possibly be improved using udev-rules.
This kernel module comes with a GPL license.