# Can anyone help a total beginner with a talking skull + trigger project?



## goodoldfreda (Oct 1, 2016)

Hi,

I'm looking to build my own talking skull for this halloween. I don't have any experience with electronics myself (save for a simple grim grinning ghosts projection I made earlier this year - cliche, I know) but I do have a can-do attitude and a dad with a soldering iron.

Honestly I don't really know where to start. I tried searching the how-to thread but to no avail. Ideally I'd like this to happen:

1. People trigger either a motion sensor or press a button (ideally motion sensor but not too fussy)

(2. A light switches on above the skull) - not entirely necessary and if I can't achieve this without using an arduino I'll leave it

3. A talking skull starts playing a custom audio track.

However I don't fully know how to make this happen. I'm going to be building this driver (I want experience in this sort of thing hence building, not buying):

I'll be using the scary terry instructions for mounting everything into the skull.

I'm also planning to use the trick of a high frequency sine wave on a separate channel to get the jaw moving accurately.

These are my questions:

1. I'm assuming that you should use a battery for the power source. What size/type should I use for that driver and a single skull + potentially a small light that'll last for the evening/night? How do I connect it up to the driver?

2. How on earth do I set the trigger up?

3. If I use two separate audio tracks (the sine wave for the skull and the audio for the... audio) how do I get them to play through different channels simultaneously? Is there a way of just combining them into one track (ie could I put the sine wave super loud and just turn the sensitivity down?)

4. On that matter, How do you actually play the audio? There's no speaker or anything on the driver so do you have to have a separate output channel to a speaker?

Any advice is appreciated.


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## Kensington Graves (Mar 7, 2016)

1. Power supply choice is driven by your power requirements. Is the light a LED, incandescent, or what? 

2. Depends on how you want your sequence to run. Is it "fire and forget"--trigger activates prop and it runs the entire sequence--or is it a simple on/off--prop only runs when the trigger is closed. For the former, you'll need some kind of timing device/microcontroller and sensor (like a passive infrared a.k.a. PIR sensor). For the latter, a "step here" trigger pad will work. 

3-4. Look up Halstaff's Frankenstein controller at haunthackers.com. It's DIY and will handle the skull animation and sound. No need to reinvent the wheel when there's an open source solution designed by a master haunter.


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## ScaryLane (Jun 3, 2013)

Kensington Graves said:


> Look up Halstaff's Frankenstein controller at haunthackers.com. It's DIY and will handle the skull animation and sound. No need to reinvent the wheel when there's an open source solution designed by a master haunter.


While the old Frankenstein does work, the new Banshee and Wee Little taker from HauntHackers.com takes the concept to the next level and is easier to use.

For all of the projects from Haunt Hackers you do need basic skills like soldering. (They do have PC boards to make building them easier.) But you still need to buy the parts and build it yourself.

The software (alone with the updates) are given away freely as open source. So the only cost is building the project in the first place.


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## goodoldfreda (Oct 1, 2016)

Thanks for the responses 

It'll probably be an LED light so I'll do a bit of research in terms of how much power it'll use.

A fire and forget system is what I'm after so I'll have to look into a timing device.

I'll take a look at those tutorials, thanks.


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## Batbuddy (Sep 3, 2014)

Hey how did it go for your build? I would have offered some help earlier, but didn't see this until now.


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