Halloween Give-away Projects

[birdman0_o]

I'm going to go ahead and assume you PM'ed those that you chose!

 

[Mr RB]

OK, the winners are;

Birdman - please PM me your address
Gaspode - have address
Mike2545 - please PM me your address
Allvol - have address
Giftiger - please PM me your address
Wombweller - please PM me your address

Special mention;

Blueroom - ill send you - have your address
3v0 - ill send you - have your address

mohd.S.H - you DO NOT get one - thanksssssssss

So please PM me with your mailing addresses if you have not done so already. It's a few more units than i expected so I'll need to solder up some more serial leads, should be ready by tomorrow.

Also! If anyone does NOT want the standard Slave1 PIC firmware installed, please choose a different firmware from this list (and make it snappy);
TalkBotBrain.com Source Files

I suggest you consider Slave4 that will play 4 sounds controlled by 4 switches, or maybe Slave6 that will randomly choose any one of the sounds when a single switch is pressed.

Of course anyone who can program ICSP the PIC 16F628 and can understand my C source code can modify the source code to suit, or you can just control it by serial 19200 baud. Anway please let me know!

 

[DirtyLude]

I'd really like to do something big next year. It's too late for me this year. I started looking at pneumatics, but solenoids and actuators are so expensive. I have plenty of hobby servo's, but they aren't really strong/fast enough for larger animatronics.

 

[giftiger_wunsch]

What sort of scale are you planning?

I have no experience with this sort of thing but I'm looking forward to seeing what I can achieve with this module kindly being provided by Mr RB. My friend and I recently had the idea of using my RabbitCore microprocessor (bit of an obscure one) to control a robotic arm, but after finally getting all the circuitry worked out it appears it'll take a while for me to have sufficient skill to produce a working PCB for the design. By that time I will probably have improved the arm's mechanics though I've never used servo motors before but it seems they will be much more suitable for that application than the standard motors provided by the manufacturers.

 

[gabeNC]

Thanks for sharing RB, i'm looking forward to see what the recipients come up with. I think a IR beam (think garage door) that gets broken when someone gets close, that triggers the pumpkin, sounds, lights, co2 etc.

Would be cool to automate an effect like this

YouTube - Thanksgiving Turkey Stomach Burst : BFX : Build

 

[DirtyLude]

I liked the jerking zombie's, and trash can jumpers kinda things. One used a homemade pneumatic actuator out of PVC pipe, which looked pretty good. Still need the solenoid, though.

I really liked the 'ground breaker'. I'll have to find it.
This is it:
YouTube - Pneumatic Ground Breaker How-To

Otherwise I think I'm going to need to cannibalize drill motors and such to get anything with a decent size moving.

 

[giftiger_wunsch]

Otherwise I think I'm going to need to cannibalize drill motors and such to get anything with a decent size moving.

I have a rather meaty motor courtesy of Hero (hopefully he'll be back soon). I think it's about a 24V motor. I was planning on trying to build a wind turbine power source out of it as an experiment, but I'm still looking for new ideas Main problem I've had with that idea is producing some fairly large light-weight beams to catch the wind, and fitting them securely on the motor. I'd probably need to remove the worm first, but I don't know how I would do that, it's pretty securely attached. Not sure if it's just pressed on and a very tight fit (in which case I'd probably need a very powerful specialist tool to remove it), or if it's actually welded to the axle (in which case I'm totally screwed). Seems to be the former though, at least. Could be a third option. I'll stop waffling now.

I've never used actuators, though I'd happily tinker with them if I could get my hand on some cheap ones. I can't think of many appliances which might contain actuators, so unless I think of a good enough use of them to warrant actually buying some, it's probably not going to happen anytime soon. And certainly not the sort of scale you're planning

 

[Mr RB]

Thanks guys! But's there's still a couple of people who need to PM me their mailing addresses.

Giftiger, if you wanted to try moving RC servos (ie animatronics) using the TalkBot it's very easy, you just send it a 2-byte serial command; containing 3 bits tell which of the 8 servos to move, and a 12bit number which is the position to move to, (5000 = full left, 7500 = middle, 10000 = full right). And obviously you can pick any position in between.

 

[birdman0_o]

This might help people out somehow:
**broken link removed**
Enjoy

 

[giftiger_wunsch]

Maybe I'll try the "boo" sound I'll consider it a success if I can make my niece jump, anyway. I probably won't get chance to do anything elaborate and real-looking, but it'd be neat to set up a mini surround-sound in the hallway and have the sound come from all directions at once

 

[Mr RB]

Great I got the last couple of addresses through and airmailed the units out today. They will take from about 6 to 12 days to get there. All got loaded with the standard Slave1 serial firmware, apart from one got the Slave2 software as requested.

Sometime over the next few days I'll put up a simple tutorial on here showing how to convert some .WAV files to a TalkBot .BTL sound library, and how to download it into the TalkBot.

I've got my own halloween project underway, it's a variation of the Slave6 random sound player with 6 scary sounds to make a talking "dice" for playing games. It's got ghosty sounds and some Vincent Price style scary laughter. I also tweaked the firmware so the big skull on top (that you press to roll the dice) has red eyes that light up when it talks.

It speaks the dice "roll" and plays a scary sound, then the red eyes flash the dice roll number for about 2 minutes afterward (so drunk people won't argue what the roll was...) then it shuts down to 130uA standby to conserve battery power. Should be fun.

Slave6 firmware implements the Microchip appnote 16bit psuedo RNG to pick the "random" sound so it should make a pretty good dice.

 

[giftiger_wunsch]

Nice, I'll be interested in seeing what that looks / sounds like when it's done.

 

[birdman0_o]

Hey Roman, just wondering if you got my email. I'll post it here as it applies to this thread:

I was just trying out your wav to digital converter program, but it didnt seem to work (im running vista) it had a error while loading a .wav file

"access violation at address 0048D9ED in module BTc.exe
Read of address 032FC508"

Thanks

Thanks again

 

[Mr RB]

Ouch! I've done no testing with Vista. Most of my code in that project is very simple and using static buffers for the large data buffer (to avoid any platform specific dynamic allocation problems). It's been well tested on Win98 and WinXP.

Can you give me more info? How large was the wave file?

 

[birdman0_o]

I don't have it on me right now but it was about 5 seconds (not too long right?)!

 

[Mr RB]

Nah that should be ok. Even up to 30 seconds or longer should be ok, the BTc Encoder software will only load the first 2 million samples from the wave. (edit) I just tested with a 39Mb .WAV file, it works ok it just reads the first 2 mega samples.

Sometimes on the net you will get COMRPESSED wave files, these are not compatible, but fortunately they are real rare. Just watch out that sometimes on those internet "get sound samples" type pages, a file is labeled as .WAV (or even has a .WAV externsion) but it is actually a .MP3 file or other type of file.

That can fool you because if you play the file in a popular program like Winamp it will just autoselect the right codec and play it ok, and it won't tell you the file is named wrong and is not really a .WAV file.

My BTc Program reads the .WAV header and reads the file data length as specified in the header, so if it is a funky file (not a proper8bit/16bit uncompressed .WAV) that might crash it. Please let me know if you find out any more.

 

[wombweller]

OK, the winners are;

Birdman - please PM me your address
Gaspode - have address
Mike2545 - please PM me your address
Allvol - have address
Giftiger - please PM me your address
Wombweller - please PM me your address

Special mention;

Blueroom - ill send you - have your address
3v0 - ill send you - have your address

mohd.S.H - you DO NOT get one - thanksssssssss

So please PM me with your mailing addresses if you have not done so already. It's a few more units than i expected so I'll need to solder up some more serial leads, should be ready by tomorrow.

Also! If anyone does NOT want the standard Slave1 PIC firmware installed, please choose a different firmware from this list (and make it snappy);
TalkBotBrain.com Source Files

I suggest you consider Slave4 that will play 4 sounds controlled by 4 switches, or maybe Slave6 that will randomly choose any one of the sounds when a single switch is pressed.

Of course anyone who can program ICSP the PIC 16F628 and can understand my C source code can modify the source code to suit, or you can just control it by serial 19200 baud. Anway please let me know!

Great news Mr.RB

I can't wait to get it going.

For my project (moving eye portrait) I will probably only use two servo outputs and maybe a couple of voices.Any info on controlling the servos from talkbot would be great. I only require minimal movement on the servos triggered maybe by IR.

Cheers

 

[EN0]

Here's a robot costume I made two years ago. I had the green LED's alternate blinking for the antennas, and two red LEDs for the eyes. I also had a voice changer that was in "Robot" mode so I had a automated kind of voice. My siblings and friends were jealous because I always got an extra handful of candy. I scared a bunch of kids because when I turned the volume up high it caused feedback making this scary noise. One kid dropped his halloween bag and didn't bother to get it! He just kept running! I retreated and he finally got it.

 

[wombweller]

Btc

Hi all

Think I'm having the dreaded Vista blues!!

I'm getting an error whilst trying to put in WAV. files in to the encoder even the sample SL. files won't run.

if anyone can advise.

Cheers

 

[wombweller]

cracked it

Hold on!!

Fixed it, I hope!!

Open up the editor exe. via 'Run as administrator' allow the prompt then all should be ok.

I'm sure this will be the same for all Vista users.

Cheers