Nuts and Volts - September 2014

wanted to improve the sound quality. The ones I’d found all used mono sound and the biggest complaint I’d heard regarded the poor sound quality. I began my design and once again found a fellow haunter working on the same concept. Chris Mekeel began work with a PICAXE but he decided to continue in another direction. I stayed with the PICAXE and soon had a working two-button banger controller with stereo sound (Figure 8).

One exciting result of this was that my design was taken to the next level by another haunter and the result is an even better controller. Tyler Straub (tstraub on the Haunt Forum) didn’t use a PICAXE chip but he did make several significant improvements including making it a four-channel button banger (see Resources). This is exactly the kind of cooperation among builders that allows us to collaborate and continue to raise the bar on the effects we’re able to accomplish.

These successes were all leading to the board I’d always wanted to have. Since many of my props included three-axis movement, I wanted a board that was totally stand-alone and wouldn’t need to be connected to a computer to run. I also wanted to be able to control not only the three-axis movement but to have an onboard stereo player and be able to have a jaw respond to the audio track. I was already doing this by employing the EZ4 (a Scary Terry board like the one featured in Vern Graner’s September 2008 Nuts & Volts article “The Talking Skull Kit”) to control the jaw movement and a simple prop controller to provide the audio and monitor the trigger inputs. It worked but it was unwieldy and required lots of wires to connect it all.

The single board solution became Frankenstein (Figure 9A and Figure 9B). Once this board is programmed with the already written basic code, only the

72 September 2014

FIGURE 9A. The Frankenstein bare board. FIGURE 9B. Frankenstein fully built up, in all his glory. FIGURE 8. My button banger now with several improvements over the original.

CREATIVE COMMONS

Creative Commons License is a noncommercial sharing license.

In essence, the license allows you to reprogram, tweak, and build upon the work for noncommercial use as long as you give credit and license your new creations under the identical terms.