Our Talking Bucky Skull is ready to party like it's 2010

We're close to calling this "Done". It's close enough that my wife took it to work for their Halloween party. She dressed it up a little to hide the wiring and stand. In the video it's configured to randomly say 10 different phrases and it's triggered by the motion sensor you see me uncover. It's driven by an Arduino and WaveShield combo with a microservo moving the jaw. The WaveShield sound board just opens the jaw based upon the volume of the sound file. So it's not perfect but it's okay. Unfortunately despite my tweaking to compensate for the weight of the jaw it appears the microservo just can't hold the jaw up. Poor Bucky is a mouth breather. That's what happens when you skimp on the servo. I'm still making adjustments though.

Credit goes to:
http://www.scary-terry.com/buckyservo/buckyservo.htm
http://arduino.cc/
http://www.ladyada.net/make/waveshield/
http://www.instructables.com/id/Talking-Arduino-Halloween-Skeleton/

On a side note.. if you just want your skull to respond to audio from an MP3 player or other device (talking all the time without being triggered by a motion sensor), this might be better:
http://www.cowlacious.com/productPages/scaryTerry/scaryTerry.html

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Tags:

• talking
• Bucky
• skull
• arduino
• waveshield

[stmute]

It was on a 1' by 1' board with what was supposed to be a temporary neck. It was some scrap metal we had and I formed it into an L so the bottom of the L was screwed to the board and the skull was bolted to the top of the L. It was really just temporary so we could test it and get it working but we got lazy and decided to just cover it with some material to hide the ugliness.

[HALLOWEENALIVE]

What was skull Mounted to?