Special thanks to long-time Parallax friend and contributor Carol Hazlett for this spooky Halloween project idea!
This is a display of a laughing skull with a moving jaw for putting on your window sill during Halloween. The skull is simple to make with a 3D printer, but you can also purchase a skull decoration at places like Hobby Lobby, JoAnn’s and Michaels. My first incarnation of this was with a store-bought skull and did not have an articulated jaw.
Some soldering is required for the (#28085) RGB LEDs used in this project. Instructions assume the LED modules are fully assembled and ready to use.
Items needed:
- (1) – Parallax Propeller Activity Board WX (#32912).
- (1) – Portable Mini Hamburger Speaker (#900-00018)
- (1) – ActivityBot Speaker Mount (#725-32905)
- (3) – WS2812 RGB LEDs (#28085) Also available as a 10-pack.
- (3) – 3-pin extension cables, of lengths needed to connect the LEDs for your project.
- (1) – Parallax Standard Servo (#900-00005)
- Skull – which I downloaded from Thingiverse.
- Mounting platform for skull. I have a 3D printed one on Thingiverse or you can make one from plastic, wood, or heavy cardboard. If you print it use the design with the cut out for the jaw.
- Jaw holder for mounting jaw on servo horn. Again there is a 3D printed version but it is also easy to fabricate in other ways.
- Holders for the RGB LEDs which will hold them in place inside the skull. As with the platform they are simple to make out of other materials if you cannot 3D print them.
- Various spacers and hardware such as screws and nuts. For the skull I mounted it 40mm above the Propeller ABWX with stacked combo of a 1” and a ½” spacer.
- Download any spooky noise wav file you would like. I used a laugh and timed the jaw to match the laugh to give it a little more realism.
- If you have SimpleIDE installed, follow the directions provided in the Play WAV Files tutorial here to load the wav file of your choice to your SD card.
- If you do not have SimpleIDE installed, you will need an SD card/USB adapter you can plug into your computer to load in your wav file. See the tutorial above for filename limits and other restrictions.
