Singing Pumpkin Guts

We decided that our haunt for 2004 will be the year of the talking and singing creatures. Yes, we have had talking and singing creatures in the past. But this year we want to have a large number of creatures, singing elaborate songs in multiple parts.

In order to make our lives easier, we have decided to design and build a standard mechanism that could be placed into any prop to make it talk and sing.

NOTE - This project is under development for Halloween 2004. We will post updates as available, but until we build it we can't be sure of any details.

Overview
Schematic
Related Pages

Overview

This is our design for universal equipment intended to make anything sing or talk. Since we intend to use a number of these to make pumpkins sing and talk in 2004, we're calling this project "Singing Pumpkin Guts".

This project hooks up to power and sound via Talking Points, our standard for talking props. If you don't care to adopt Talking Points, you can still use this circuit; just feed power and audio signals in at the right places.

When all components are included, this project provides:

an internal speaker that reproduces the sound of speech or singing
internal lights that flicker in time with the sound
internal lights that are on all the time
an animated jaw that open and closes in time with the speech
animated eyelids that open when the prop is speaking and shut when it is done

The builder can decide which components to use or leave out. So you can build this circuit with no eyelids if you don't want or need them.

Schematic

This is the schematic for universal equipment intended to make anything sing or talk.

WARNING: This is a very early draft of the schematic, and doesn't work properly. It's just here to give you an idea as to the approximate complexity of the circuit. We have debugged a prototype and are working on a new revision to be posted once we are confident we are done with it. The audio amplifier (red box) is particularly cheesie, and might be removed entirely. The power supply conditioning is also debatable.

Click for full size schematic.

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