Gadgetory

hey I'm Donald Bell Halloween is my favorite time of year because it gives me a great excuse to try out some hi-tech Halloween props today I'm gonna show you how to set up an interactive talking skull this one comes from fright props it runs about $350 which sounds pricey but you're getting a real prop great piece of gear here and when we crack it open later on you're gonna see that there's some really interesting technology going on inside but first let's take an inventory of all the things we're going to need to have to make this work I've got the skull here which comes with a power adapter and an audio splitter you'll need a Phillips head screwdriver you'll need some powered speakers though you could go with something as small as one of these little portable speakers you'll need a microphone it could be a cheap karaoke mic or something a little nicer and you'll need a little mixer or a preamp that can work as a hub between the microphone the skull and the speaker's a small two channel mixer or four channel mixer is more than enough to get the job done you also need a few audio cables one for the mic one going to the skull and one going from the skull to the speaker all right now it's time to crack open the skull on the back here you're gonna see two screws we're gonna take those out and then we're gonna slide it apart here's what's going on inside are you gonna see that there's a little motor here for controlling the eyes and the front another motor down here for controlling the jaw and then you've got this guy this little box here is called the Pico talk it takes any audio signal you plug into it and it uses the volume of that sound to determine when to open and shut the jaw it also controls how the eyes dart back and forth let's get everything connected together we're gonna run the power cable through the base of the skull plate here through the hole and then through the little hole here off to the side and then plug it in to where it says power now we're gonna take the audio cable the little splitter cable that comes with it we're gonna run that through the hole here and we're gonna plug that in to where it says audio now we've got both of those cables running through the hole here this other hole here in the middle this is meant for mounting on a pole so we're not going to run cables through that and then we're going to put the back of the skull back and screw it back together now if we plug this into power we should hopefully see a little twitch it's alive next we're gonna feed some audio into this thing and get the job working I've got my mixer here I've got a microphone plugged into a channel here on the mixer and the main volumes turned all the way up and while I'm talking here I can see that the volume meter is responding now to get audio from the mixer to the skull I'm gonna run a cable from the output of the mixer into any one of the two inputs here from the splitter cable okay it's starting to work now but the jaw isn't opening quite as much as it could be so the simple fix is to crank the volume here on the mixer until you get a more natural jaw movement like that now if you really want to geek out you can open this thing back up and mess the Pico talk controller inside you can adjust the audio sensitivity you can adjust how quickly the eyes start back and forth you can adjust the range of the jaw itself all of that is possible but I'm gonna skip that for the sake of time here and jump ahead to the next step which is hooking up the skull to some speakers any cheap pair of speakers will do but I'm gonna go with a little small rechargeable speaker that I can fit inside the skull so there's a little cable here wired to the bottom of the speaker so all I need to do is plug this into the other output on the splitter and turn up the volume on the speaker and we're good to go all right now turn the volume back up on the mixer here I can hear myself coming from the skull he looks like he's doing a reasonable job mimicking me now I've got my own little undead buddy I can hang out with all Halloween alright so where do you go from here you could attach a whole skeleton to the rest of this thing another way to take this further would be to take out your old guitar pedals assuming you have some and you can use some crazy effects on the voice this one's a reverb pedal plug it in and then you can get some extra spooky echo Halloween sound hahaha you could also take yourself out of the equation entirely and how the skull react to recorded audio over on scene out how to I have a video tutorial on how to turn your computer keyboard into an interactive sound board I also have an advanced one on programming your own Halloween sound and light show using a prop controller called a key banger combining all of those techniques along with this interactive skull will make for a super nerd tastic Halloween and I'm all about that so you see this icon and all about wishing Miss Piggy Halloween you