Halloween Props: Talking Skeleton In Reaper Robes

Here’s a great way to guard your front door on Halloween. [Sam Seide] built a motion controlled talking skeleton. The electronics are fairly straight forward, consisting of an Arduino, WAV shield, PIR motion sensor, servo motor for the jaw, and a couple of red LEDs for the eyes. But [Sam] did some really neat things in the design of the skeleton itself. As we saw with the puking pirate, he built the body out of PVC so that he can take it apart for easy storage. Under the reaper robe you’ll find a set of powered computer speakers that connect to the WAV shield. The servo motor is mounted in the skull and moves the jaw using a small wire arm. Since the whole thing is a bit flexible (thanks to the PVC), the torque of the motor causes the skeleton to move around, adding a touch of life. Don’t miss the well-made video walkthrough after the break.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GpKBXUxfMPI]

[via Hack N Mod]

11 thoughts on “Halloween Props: Talking Skeleton In Reaper Robes

  1. Thanks for posting this! Be sure to check out the other halloween vids I put up on building tombstones, pvc candles, and my huge cemetary caretaker costume I’ll be wearing in my front yard this halloween! Halloween is the greatest holiday for hacking stuff!

  2. Arduino is not technically a microcontroller , Arduino is technically the hardware (the headers, the variation of serial to Microcontroller interface, This is the easy part,) And most importantly a bootloader and a software interface (libraries) to program the microcontroller.
    To put it simply if:
    a box of parts is point A
    And a prototype is point C
    Arduino is point B.
    It is the difference between me taking any where between 3 days , and a week to do something like set up an ECCP capture, the timer , the hardware , the code, and you using pulse in or count and being done in 5 mins after slapping a shield on.

    The microcontroller involved with the Uno for instance is ATmega328 microcontroller.

  3. Some wise guy is gonna say it so,

    There are actually two microcontrollers in the uno,
    a ATmega8U2 provides the USB interface. Just another fact that should make you feel silly calling the “arduino” a microcontroller considering it actually contains 2 actual microcontrollers.

  4. Thanks for the microcontroller info, very interesting! Yes, this was my halloween project last year, but that doesn’t make it any less fun. I have video of what I’ve done this halloween up on ZackScott’s youtube channel as well.

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