Funhouse Projects

[DougLowe]

This year Debbie & I built a walk-through carnival Fun House inside our house -- where the dining and family rooms are. An unedited walk-through video can be seen at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E31o4oTG6iA.

The Fun House featured two EFX-TEK projects which can be seen near the end of the video. First is a pneumatic Jack-In-The-Box that uses a Prop-1, AP-8, RC-4, and a PIR. The program turns the crank on the box (via a Saturn wiper blade motor) and plays Pop Goes the Weasel  until the PIR triggers the pneumatic valve to pop up, accompanied by one of the other 7 sounds on the AP-8 randomly selected. Jack stays up for a couple of seconds, then goes back down.

There's actually a bug in the code -- I forgot to add a post-effect delay, so as long as you keep moving in front of the PIR, the thing keeps popping up. After Halloween is all cleaned up I plan on revisiting the code to fix that. (Sadly I lost the program! I wish there were a way to upload code from the board back to the computer. But this is not complicated code, so I won't have any problems reconstructing it.)

The second prop is an antique ventriloquist doll to which I attached a servo, controlled by a Prop-2 with sound from an AP-8. Originally I was going to have him say one of eight different things. I used a Prop-2 for this because I thought I would run out of memory with a Prop-1. In testing we discovered that you couldn't understand anything he says anyway, so I switched it to just laughing, which doesn't really have to be understandable to be creepy. To program uses DATA statements that provides timing data for the servo to alternate in the mouth open and closed positions -- the loop reads a pair of numbers, drives the servo to the open position for the duration indicated by the first number, then drives the servo to the closed position for the duration of the second number. A 0,0 pair indicates the end of the sequence. I chose the numbers by painstaking trial & error to get the mouth to sync reasonably well with the laughter.

I'm not convinced that this was the best use of a Prop-2 board, as it was a lot of work just to get the mouth to sync with audio, when a Scary Terry card would probably have accomplished the same thing with less effort and expense. But that wasn't the point; I had not done anything with servos until this project & I wanted to learn about how they are programmed. My conclusion is that programming one at a time is no big deal, but two or more would be a challenge. The program would resemble the plate spinning guy on Ed Sullivan.

Thanks for all your help along the way, Jon! Both props were very well received, both at our party and by trick-or-treaters on Halloween night.

--Doug 

[livinlowe]

I love it! But, uhhh, those clowns are freaking me out man!  :o