Lelo Lyla RF/Arduino Control Hack

One of the best things that I think can happen to someone who blogs about a horribly over-specific subject is to have a story be so interesting and well-written that they get so caught up in interacting and watching explode that they completely forget to actually write about the damn thing on their own site until 3 days later. I find myself in that situation now, and couldn't be happier about it.

3 days ago, scanlime wrote one of the best, clearest, most accessible reverse engineering posts I've ever read, and it just so happened to be about sex toys. She took a Lelo Leya vibrator, which uses a common RF chip to talk to an accelerometer enabled controller, reversed the RF protocol, and made a new hardware control solution using sonar rangefinders that better fit her interface needs.

Then the internet blew up.

The list goes on for quite a while.

There's... honestly not much to be said on here. I'm not gonna summarize the article any more than I have. For fuck sake, go read it (and watch the video above). I can only hope to put out content of this quality in future Slashdong posts. Everything is outlined understandably, and the project accomplished a well-set goal in a straight-forward way.

More than that, I hope we start seeing more content like this, period. It's sometimes been lonely running Slashdong and I love seeing more stuff like this. Most of what the media has covered lately has been "did you know you can fuck with a computer?" or "look what the weird fetish people do!" shit. Not getting the media they should are the many new businesses/projects/blogs like Doctor Xtreme and his Orgasmatron X1 or the Toymaker Project and their Hammer Sensor/LED Dildo. All of whom I need to get around to covering here, but even if I don't, the fact that they exist and that the DIY sex tech world is becoming a slightly more populated place is pretty fucking awesome. I've watched the cycle of sex tech oscillate for almost 8 years now, and this is the most momentum I can remember the DIY side building. There's certainly exciting things in the commercial realms, especially with some new startups happening, but in the end, I'm personally more interested in small, one-off, well executed solutions than large commercial successes.

So, here's to a hopeful upswing in the cycle that doesn't end so quick this time. Or maybe doesn't end at all.

Now, back to the eye bleeding task of mining comment threads for what what tidbits of decent content I can among sexist anti-fucking shitbags. It's a tough job, but... no, no one should really have to do it.