Talking Ken Doll

Not a great video, but it shows the pull-string activated voice-box in action. Recorded this as soon as I got the costume on in case the electronics broke before I got to the party. You can see the blue light of the speaker shining through my shirt. I'm not actually talking at all in the video, just moving my lips.

Here's more info on the design:
The voice is the speaker. There's a blue light shining through the shirt which is actually just a small, but loud, pair of speakers a little larger than a deck of cards.

I took the voicebox from a Toy Story doll, removed the speaker and soldered some wires to the switch on the pull-string before closing it back up. (you can see the voicebox switch on another video of mine)

Then I bought a cheap mp3 player from Menards ($20 for 1 GB), took a knife to it (carefully) to access the switch, then soldered three wires to the three connections and eventually soldered two of those wires to the wires on the switch and the third (with one of the others) to a little push button switch from a computer in order to start the "play" mode.

The speakers just plugged in to the mp3 player and a little wire wrap was added to protect the wires running from the string on my back to the mp3 player on my front. All of these were attached to me via a harness made of rope that I just messed around with until it worked. It started with a solid (not slip-knot) loop for each arm connecting as a solid anchor behind my shoulders for the string, and then down my chest to anchor the front parts and around one leg to so it wouldn't get pulled over my shoulder.

The principle behind the recordings was that I didn't have to worry about starting/stopping in the middle of a phrase if the switch pushed the fast-forward button rather than the play/pause button. So each phrase was a single mp3 with an hour of silence added onto the end. Each time the string is pulled it would fast forward to the start of the next phrase and there was no need to pause or stop in between. The side effect is that if nobody pulls the cord within an hour, it'll say the next phrase on it's own, but that just helps make it creepy.

It's a great project if you're comfortable with a little soldering and have a little patience. It was a little tricky to get it started after loading the battery, some electrical quirk where it would interpret the fast-forward switch as a pause message, but once it got going I never had it fail before the party was over.

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[rosetyler23]

this is a dude not a doll