My halloween display.

[youngti]

Okay, so after all the e-mails to the guys here at EFX-TEK this is my Halloween display.  After all that work, not many TOT's.  Oh well, that not the whole reason we all do this.  You can view my video at Youtube at the link below. 

Thank you guys for all your help, next year things will be better.  I will work on the chorus to make sure the jaws follow the song better.  Ran out of time this year, also better lighting.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wA9tDIWiSvU

[Desert_gold_hound]

^{Ran out of time this year;}

Man you could start now and still run out of time with all of that! nice full display I like it very much. Thank you for sharring!

Do you feel the need for faster servo's or do you think its just a matter of doing some more code? I knoticed that some times the mouth just remained open that is why I am asking.

This display is awsome though I hope you do a x-mas display becouse I would like to see more of your work.

Good luck on getting the jaw movment more in tune with the music. Even if you don't finish it off its still class A work in my book.

[youngti]

It has to do with the board I'm using to control the servo.  I am using the ST200 from Cowlacious and it tends to react to all sound.  I plan on redoing the songs by adding tracks and inserting a 22K tone each time I want the jaw to move.  I can then adjust the board to only react to the tone and that should produce more reliable results.   Started that, unfortunately with the 5 songs, it would have taken me much longer than I had to finish.

Also playing around with the Idea of putting each skull on separate ST200's and adding tone tracks for each one.  that way, I can have skulls be more individual. 

Each skull had 4 servos, one for the jaw and three for the movement.  Need to tweak the movement a little too.  May need to bump the board that controls the movement up from a Prop-2 to a Prop SX.

As far as Christmas goes, spent too much money on the Halloween to ramp up to Christmas.  I would love to, I've loved the displays that use the Light-O-Rama  Showtime product ( http://www.lightorama.com/products.html ).  And i know I can do the same thing with the Prop 2 or SX.  I would need to purchase a few of the RC-4 and relays.

Thank you for your compliments.

[JonnyMac]

If you want to do Christmas lighting on a small scale you can use Vixen (www.vixenlights.com) which is free and our RC-4 (switching on) and FC-4 (dimming) boards -- we have a driver for Vixen 1.11 for the RC-4/FC-4; you connect them directly to your computer using our Serial Inverter. 

We had a special last year on these products that ran in December -- perhaps we should bring that up.

BTW, I concur with DGH: fantastic display and clearly a lot of work.  I especially liked the skull FCG.

[youngti]

not to detract from what DGh said, but praise from you means a lot.  Let me know if you are doing a special, maybe I can sweet talk some money out of my wife ;D

[Desert_gold_hound]

Putting a 22k tone is something I will have to probaly learn to do as it seems we are running on limmited recourses when it comes to robotics. I hope they start building some bigger eeprom chips for these cards. I would love to deal with GB instead of KB's but I think that is along way off.

[youngti]

This link on YouTube is where I got the idea ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uMHaoVA0GMU ).  Unfortunately I found this on October 27th so I didn't really have enough time to try it.  If you have a short sound clip, it wouldn't take so much time.  But with full songs, the number of tones would make a month long project.

I don't have any experience with the AP-8 so I don't know if you can record multiple tracks on it to make this work.  I plugged the computer directly into the board to control the jaw. 

If not, that would be really cool, to have that option in the AP-8.

[Desert_gold_hound]

That is a good link but brings up a couple of questions we could all think about.

Is he filtering all but the 22k sound or will other sounds activate the servo?

Could you use other high frequency sounds to run multiple props on the same speaker channel? I.E. 22K and 22.5K

The other thing is if we could use multiple frequency's we could ultimately control everything with the sound so we could do only a few lines of code and then have the sound control the rest. Basically we would be running an infinite loop.

The other problem I do see is that sometimes sounds don't open a mouth up all the way and I think it would be more realistic if you could do this....Of course we are dealing with Halloween here and not realistic so I guess this doesn't really matter.

The most important what software would you use for sound editing? I know a lot of you already have your favorites but I don't edit sound on a daily basis so this is an area (price in mind) I have to consider.

[youngti]

well this discussion is getting a bit off of the EFX-TEK products.  The board that I use for the jaw sync allows you to adjust the sensitivity, meaning that the Tone is more "there" (not sure of the right word) than the song.  That way you can adjust the board just to activate on the tone and ignore the other sounds (I think).  Again I have not had time to really work on this, but from what the link shows it can be done this way.  This should probably be in another forum, since we are getting away from EFX-TEK products.  I don't want to wast their resources on this.

Sorry Jon and John. :-[ :)

[JonnyMac]

Our products were used in the mix and as long as you're helping others and not promoting a company that would like to see our demise (grin), we're okay with the conversation.  My good friend, Scary Terry Simmons, has used tone decoders to trigger parts of his display through his audio system.

[John Wohlers]

Out of curiosity, would the AP-8 be able to playback that high of a tone if it were stored in the chip?

[JonnyMac]

Nope, not even close.  The AP-8 sample rate is 8 kHz which means that it "should" be able to reproduce up to 4 kHz, but that's really not practical.  You'll need an MP3 player for that sort of thing.  Terry imposes an 18 kHz signal onto audio tracks that he plays through a uMP3 or VMUSIC (mp3) player, then uses a custom-built 567 tone detector circuit to "listen" for the audio cue.

[youngti]

The little I tried i had it set to the 18K that the clip suggested.  However when i played it back i could hear the tone.  The object here is to get the jaw to activate, with out hearing the tone so that is why I used the 22k.  My speakers couldn't reproduce that high of a tone (or my ears couldn't hear it).  I was driving the audioservo board directly from my PC.  I only did a little on this so further experimentation is in order.  What the heck I have 11 months to work on it.