Nuts and Volts - September 2008

■ FIGURE 14. Tightening the servo horn on the servo.

■ FIGURE 15. Steven Reeves shows off his completed skull modification.

■ FIGURE 16. TXfx and Robot Group members soldering together printed circuit boards.

I then headed to the garage and got some additional lighting for the solder table. Lesson learned — good lighting is critical when working with small electronics! We tested each board as it was completed and with the exception of an inverted LED and a couple of other small solder mistakes, we were able to get a 100% success rate even on boards assembled by folks that had very little soldering experience.

Let’s Give Them Something to Talk About!

So, now that we have a talking skull, we need something for it to say! To help get you started, there are some

SPECIAL THANK YOUS

■ “Scary” Terry Simmons for his very cool servo audio board design and his generosity in sharing the design with all of us.

■ Carl Cowley of Cowlacious Designs for creating the Talking Skull kit and getting the kits sent to us in time for the Make and Take.

■ The TxFX members who came out and made the Make and Take so much fun.

■ Paul Atkinson of The Robot Group for being our #1 soldering guru.

■ Eric Lundquist of The Robot Group for troubleshooting, teaching, and testing.

■ Ed Gonzalez of The Robot Group for photography and tech assistance.

■ Hedstrom Music for some of the cool MP3 sound files!

■ And, last but not least, to my wife Kym for allowing us to wreck her kitchen for the weekend! Thanks Honey!

pre-made spooky and silly MP3 files with dialog and music/efx on separate channels available for download from the Nuts & Volts website ( www.nutsvolts.com). These sound files can be loaded into an MP3 player or burned to an audio CD for use with the project. There are some corny jokes and some scary sounding haunted house rules, as well as other bits of dialog that can be fun to play through the skull. If you load all of them onto a player and then set it to random-play mode, your talking skull can chatter away through the evening with interesting and ever-changing fun dialog. Some folks like to use a pair of skulls and set one to respond to the left side audio and one to respond to the right side audio. They then hide a speaker behind or under each skull and play some back and forth dialog usually referred to as “Joking Skellies.” This way, the two skulls carry on a conversation with each one responding to its own unique sound track.

It is Remotely Possible

If downloading MP3s or burning CDs isn’t to your liking, as an alternative you could use a standard FM radio to drive the audio servo board and an FM transmitter to make the talking skull say anything you like! Imagine placing the skull on the front porch and watching from your window as people approach. What? You don’t have an FM transmitter? Well, as luck would have it, there’s an FM transmitter kit featured in this month’s issue of Nuts & Volts that is also available as a kit in the Nuts & Volts store. To learn about this cool kit, turn to page 40.