Big Mouth Billy Bass Channels Miley Cyrus

April 14, 2018 by Rich Hawkes 12 Comments

Here’s a Big Mouth Billy Bass with extra lip thanks to Alexa. If you’re not already familiar, Big Mouth Billy Bass is the shockingly popular singing animatronic fish designed to look like a trophy fish mounted to hang on your wall. In its stock condition, Billy uses a motion sensor to break into song whenever someone walks by. It’s limited to a few songs, unless you like to hack things — in which case it’s a bunch of usable parts wrapped in a humorous fish! Hackaday’s own [Bob Baddeley] combined the fish with an Amazon Echo Dot, connecting the two with an ATtiny84, and having Billy speak for Alexa.

[Bob] had a few problems to solve, including making Billy’s mouth move when there was audio playing, detecting when the Echo was on, moving the motors and playing the audio. After a bit of research and a lot of tweaking, a Fast Fourier Transform algorithm designed for the ATtiny was used was used to get the mouth moving. The mouth didn’t move a lot because of the design of the fish, and [Bob] modified it a bit, but there was only so much he could do.

It’s all well and good for the fish to lie there and sing, but [Bob] wanted Billy to move when Alexa was listening, and in order the detect this, the best bet was to watch for the Dot’s light to turn on. He tried a couple of things but decided that the simplest method was probably the best and ended up just taping a photo-resistor over the LED. Now Billy turns to look at you when you ask Alexa a question.

With a few modifications to the Dot’s enclosure, everything now fits inside the original mounting plaque and, after some holes were drilled so the Dot could hear, working. Billy has gone from just a few songs to an enormous entire library of songs to sing!

We’ve seen Alexa combined with Big Mouth Billy Bass before, but just demos and never an excellent guide like [Bob’s]. The nice thing about this guide is that once you’ve hacked the hardware, it’s a breeze to add new functionality using Alexa skills.

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Halloween Prop: Bigmouth Billy Bass

October 6, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 8 Comments

Back in 2001, the Bigmouth billy bass was still relatively new. Hacking one to record and play back both audio and movement was quite a new feat. You can read all about how they pulled it off. Though most of us agree that this could be done easier now, with off the shelf microcontrollers, this is a great example of constructing your own system to fit the need. We’ve seen a similar hack done very recently with an mbed microcontroller.

State Of The Art Big Mouth Alexa Bass

February 7, 2019 by Tom Nardi 9 Comments

Hackers seem intent on making sure the world doesn’t forget that, for a brief shining moment, everyone thought Big Mouth Billy Bass was a pretty neat idea. Every so often we see a project that takes this classic piece of home decor and manages to shoehorn in some new features or capabilities, and with the rise of voice controlled home automation products from the likes of Amazon and Google, they’ve found a new ingredient du jour when preparing stuffed bass.

[Ben Eagan] has recently completed his entry into the Pantheon of animatronic fish projects, and while we’ll stop short of saying the world needed another Alexa-enabled fish on the wall, we’ve got to admit that he’s done a slick job of it. Rather than trying to convince Billy’s original electronics to play nice with others, he decided to just rip it all out and start from scratch. The end result is arguably one of the most capable Billy Bass updates we’ve come across, if you’re willing to consider flapping around on the wall an actual capability in the first place.

The build process is well detailed in the write-up, and [Ben] provides many pictures so the reader can easily follow along with the modification. The short version of the story is that he cuts out the original control board and wires the three motors up to an Arduino Motor Driver Shield, and when combined with the appropriate code, this gives him full control over Billy’s mouth and body movements. This saved him the trouble of figuring out how to interface with the original electronics, which is probably for the better since they looked rather crusty anyway.

From there, he just needed to give the fish something to get excited about. [Ben] decided to connect the 3.5 mm audio jack of an second generation Echo Dot to one of the analog pins of the Arduino, and wrote some code that can tell him if Amazon’s illuminated hockey puck is currently yammering on about something or not. He even added a LM386 audio amplifier module in there to help drive Billy’s original speaker, since that will now be the audio output of the Dot.

A decade ago we saw Billy reading out Tweets, and last year we presented a different take on adding an Alexa “brain” to everyone’s favorite battery powered fish. What will Billy be up to in 2029? We’re almost too scared to think about it. Continue reading “State Of The Art Big Mouth Alexa Bass” →

Billy Bass With Selectable Clips

January 20, 2010 by Mike Szczys 22 Comments

[Will] enjoys giving hacked items as Secret Santa gifts and this year he decided to augment a Billy Bass. These gag items have become a popular hack to use as a prop or to read your Twitter updates to you. Right of the bat he scrapped the original PCB and sent it to the gift’s future recipient as if he were a kidnapper extorting a family. He then set to work replacing the guts with a pair of PIC 18F452 microcontrollers. One uses power transistors to control the movement, the other controls an MP3 that handles the sound clips. The interface has some LEDs for added effect and uses a dial to select each sound clip which is displayed on a 4×20 character LCD.

The project has several voltage headaches as the motors operate at 6v and 4v, the microcontrollers and LCD display at 5v, and the MP3 is looking for 1.5v. That’s for voltages supplying this Frankenstein’d schematic. But he pulled it off, as you can see in the video after the break.

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Embedded Linux Billy Bass

February 13, 2005 by Jason Striegel 4 Comments

linux billy bass
if you haven’t seen this project before, it’s well worth a look. the author shows us how to control billy from a pc104 embedded pc running linux. included is an introduction into using open source tools for creating audio transcriptions, which can then be used to make billy lip-sync to custom audio clips.

the software controls the bass via the pc’s parallel port. if you are interested in doing something like this, you might also want to check out the article we recently posted on controlling an r/c car from your parallel port.

toy hacks and controlling devices from your pc are really great topics. i’d love to see more hacks like this. make sure to send in your tips!

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Singing Fish Nails Sea Shanty Audition

July 2, 2022 by Lewin Day 6 Comments

The Big Mouth Billy Bass and other singing fish were a scourge first delivered to us in the late 90s. [Kevin Heckart] has been teaching them to sing new songs without the tinny sound quality and hokey folk tunes. For this, he must be applauded.

A Teensy 4.1 or Teensy 3.2 is used to power [Kevin]’s various singing fish builds. There are two motors inside a singing fish, typically — one motor to pivot the fish’s body, and one to open and close the mouth. Hook these up to a motor driver, and command that with the Teensy, and you’re up and running. To sync the fish with the music, MIDI data is sent to the Teensy over USB. The Teensy takes in note data and uses this to command the motors to make the fish appear to sing along.

The tutorial linked above is a great way to learn how the hack was achieved. However, the real money is in the performance. A video of [Kevin]’s fishy chorus performing the famous Wellerman sea shanty has over 50 million views on YouTube and he’s collected over 26 million likes on Tiktok.

Sometimes the simple hacks are the ones that bring the most joy. Video after the break.

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Water Level Sensors, Alexa In A Fish, And Modular Synths During World Create Day

March 19, 2018 by Mike Szczys 3 Comments

On Saturday we saw a flood of interesting hacks come to life as more than 100 community organized meetups were held for World Create Day. Thank you to all of the organizers who made these events possible, and for everyone who decided to get together and hack.

Students Learning Hardware Design in Islamabad, Pakistan

The students at LearnOBots took on a slew of great projects during World Create Day like a smart medicine dispenser, electronics that control mains appliances, parking sensors, and a waste bin that encourages you to feed it. The group did a wonderful job of showing off their event by publishing several updates with pictures, stories, and video presentations from all the students. Nice work!