●●●●
THE TALKING
SKULL KIT
BY VERN GRANER
BOO! Fall is in the air and Halloween is just
around the corner. It’s time to start getting
ready for those trick or treaters that will
be coming to your door in just a few
short weeks! Halloween is a fun time for
make-believe and for kids (and adults!) to
play “dress up.” It’s a time to make fun of
the things that scare us and to have fun
being scared. It’s also a time where folks
who have a bit of tech-savvy can impress
the heck out of their neighbors.
An evening at the workbench spent crafting a new
creation can result in laughter and screams from the
neighborhood kiddos. “How did you DO that!?” is a
phrase we all love to hear when someone gets a close-up
look at something we’ve built. Soldering back together a
broken battery connector or wiring up a boat trailer for
the neighbor can only gain you so much credibility. If
you want the “Joneses” to have to keep up with you this
Halloween, an LED-eye blinking, servo-operated, animated
talking skull may be just the ticket!
34
September 2008
You May Ask Yourself,
“How Did We Get Here?”
A carved pumpkin or a spooky scarecrow on the front
porch is pretty typical fare for Halloween. But taking it to
the next level requires a bit of skill and imagination. Enter
Terry Simmons (a.k.a., “Scary Terry”) of California State
Polytechnic University, Pomona, CA. An avid “haunter”
and electronics buff, Terry wanted to animate a life-sized
plastic “Bucky” skull he had purchased. When he went
looking for a way to accomplish this, he discovered that
many of the motion systems for talking or animated props
were pretty complicated. Some required a microcontroller
or computer and expected you to invest hours of painstaking
programming to coordinate all the servo motions to the
sound track. Wanting something simpler, he decided to
build a sound-activated circuit to drive a typical hobby
servo motor. On his website, he describes the project:
“My goal in creating this was for a relatively simple,
inexpensive, and reliable circuit that doesn’t require
programming a microcontroller for each individual
movement. I’ve used several of these circuits over the last
several Halloweens to provide mouth movements on Bucky
■ FIGURE 1. Prototype of Scary Terry audio servo board.
(Photo courtesy of Terry Simmons.)
