Let's make some custom modifications to Boris, the talking skull!
Let's make some custom modifications to Boris, the talking skull!
Boris comes in several flavors:
Here is the wired version of Boris, new in the box.
Here is the wired version of Boris, unpacked and ready to go.
I'm not fond of the wireless Boris. The idea is nice - a skull that can sit anywhere, even be carried around, as it talks to you. But it costs extra for the wireless facility that I don't need in a haunt tableau. And numerous users have reported interference, with Boris happily lip-synching along with radio broadcasts or wireless baby monitors.
By the way, Boris includes a built-in voice changer. It can take your normal voice and make it tinny and "robotic", or deep and "monsterish". I don't like this feature, and keep it turned off.
I started by replacing the red LEDs with orange LEDs.
Remove the skull top; unscrew and move aside the black battery box, exposing the insides.
The LEDs just poke through small holes in the back of the eye sockets.
They are held in place with a blob of
hot-melt glue.
You can find them by following the two pairs of blue and white wires.
Replacement is pretty simple:
We decided to place some round polished crystals of clear quartz in the eye sockets of Boris.
This picture was taken with the crystals just sitting there.
They look a bit better when properly seated.
Boris, shown with a plain LED and a crystal eye.
The LED on the right looks acceptable from some angles.
The crystal eye on the left looks unearthly from anyplace.
We got the quartz crystals at
Michael's.
They sell an assortment in a net bag for a couple of bucks.
Paw through the bags until you find one with some fairly large, fairly round stones.
The outer surface of the crystal is tumbled and polished to a shine.
The inside of the crystal has a lot of "imprefections" that diffuses and scatters the light.
We mounted the crystals with hot-melt glue, squirting some around the inside of the eye socket, then inserting the stone. Do a lot of careful dry-fit testing before you add the glue. In our case, the glue seemed to grab quickly and hold very strongly.
For more ways to treat eyes that light up, please see using LED creature eyes.
Note: Some equipment might not have a strong enough output signal to drive Boris. I am skeptical of "line out" (line-level) connectors that some players offer, and that home stereos usually expose as RCA jacks. You should use an output that has a volume control that you can turn up or down, like a headphone jack. Always start your testing with the volume control set as low as possible, and slowly move it up.
I assume that your source of mono audio has a mono 1/8-inch phono jack. You must obtain a matching plug. Radio Shack #274-286 or #274-287 should do. The capacitor is a 10.0µF 50V 20% Axial-Lead Non-Polarized Electrolytic Capacitor, such as RadioShack #272-999.
Connect components to the cable from Boris as follows:
Note: The plug doesn't look exactly like this.
I show a "cut-away" view, to indicate the electrical connections.
Your source of mono audio may use a RCA jack. You must obtain a matching plug. Radio Shack #274-319 or #274-384 should do. [Note that RCA jacks are frequently used for line-level signals. I don't recommend the use of line-level signals because (a) the signal is weak and (b) there is no volume control.]
You will have to decide whether your Boris will use the left or right channel from the stereo. I assume that your source of audio has a stereo 1/8-inch phono jack. You must obtain a matching plug. Radio Shack #274-284 should do. The capacitor is a 10.0µF 50V 20% Axial-Lead Non-Polarized Electrolytic Capacitor, such as RadioShack #272-999.
Connect components to the cable from Boris as follows:
Note: The plug doesn't look exactly like this.
I show a "cut-away" view, to indicate the electrical connections.
Using this arrangement, two Boris skulls can tell jokes to each other, or perform other material for two parts. One Boris speaks the sound track from the left channel. The other Boris speaks the sound track from the right channel.
I assume that your source of audio has a stereo 1/8-inch phono jack. You must obtain a matching plug. Radio Shack #274-284 should do. The capacitors are 10.0µF 50V 20% Axial-Lead Non-Polarized Electrolytic Capacitor, such as RadioShack #272-999.
Connect components to the cable from the Boris skulls as follows:
Note: The plug doesn't look exactly like this.
I show a "cut-away" view, to indicate the electrical connections.
The previous modifications assume that you want one thing: take sounds from a boom box or CD player and run them straight into Boris. And that is all you will ever do. So it was natural to chop off the microbone and replace it with something that would plug into your sound source.
The following modifications are a bit more flexible. They assume that (a) you might want to restore the original "microbone"; (b) there are various other sound sources that you might want to try feeding into Boris.
We decided to do this in a way that provided maximum flexibility, so we put in a plug and socket arrangement so that the original microphone could be used, or unplugged and another sound source fed in.
The material of the skull is thick in some places; too thick for the threaded part of the jack to stick through.
Here, a burr is used to countersink the hole from the inside of the skull.
The jacks are installed and wired.
The photo shows two jacks.
One of the jacks is for this mod - a way of feeding sound into Boris.
The other jack is for an
Audio Output Jack.
This is an easy one.
In order to use the audio input jack, you need a patch cord that connects between the sound source (we used a portable CD player) and the jack newly installed in Boris.
The capacitor is installed in the audio jumper cable, like this.
You can wire the stereo plug to take Boris's voice from the right or left channel.
The result is similar to Mono (Not Stereo) Audio Source, except that Boris isn't locked into a cable that plugs into only one kind of sound source. You can use the socket in the Boris skull to have the skull speak other audio material.
This setup lets you plug the "microbone" back into Boris.
The speaker conversion was understood to be a bit more complex than the audio input jack, because we wanted more flexibility.
It actually turned out to be a problem:
The speaker conversion worked as planned, giving the flexibility of internal or external speaker. But it had two unpleasant side-effects. First, when the external powered speaker was used, the sound quality was poor (even when the Boris voice changer was turned off). Second, plugging in the external powered speakers caused Boris's jaw to stop moving. It looks like we are once again victims of strange circuit design inside the talking skull. I'm guessing that the internal speaker and jaw motor are hooked together in some strange way.
Until we get this figured out, we're using a splitter to send the sound track to both Boris and the amplified speaker.
If you want to turn off the internal speaker entirely,
you can make a plug that contains a 10-ohm 1-Watt resistor and stick that into the output jack.
If you need a longer cable, you can splice in an extra piece of cable to make it longer.
The only way we know of to get good sound out of Boris is to completely bypass his sound circuits and just use him for jaw motion and flashing eyes.
The first step in doing this is to get decent amplified speakers and then route your sound source to both Boris (for his jaw and eyes) and to the speakers (for good sound).
If you want this to be permanent, you can splice the wires.
If you want to be able to change the setup,
an adapter such as this can take the sound source and send it to both speakers and skull.
Sometimes you don't even need an adapter: We run Boris off of a cheap CD player that separate jacks for "line out" (we feed this to the amplified speakers) and "headphone out" (we feed this to the skull).
The second step consists of silencing the bad sound from the skull. This is optional: if you turn up the good sound loud enough, you can drown out the bad sound.
You can't just cut out the speaker. In my experience, Boris won't operate without some load there. If you remove the speaker, you must replace it with a resistor.
If you installed a closed-circuit jack for Boris output, it can act as a switch. Just plug insert a plug that has a resistor soldered into it. If you want to silence Boris permanently, you can open him up and solder the resistor in place of the speaker. A 10-ohm 1-Watt resistor works well. You might be able to use Radio Shack #271-1101 10 ohm 1/2W 5% Carbon Film. [I haven't tried the 1/2W resistor. If you do, please write to me with your experience. See how hot it gets during operation; if it's so hot you can't hold your finger on it, you need to find a 1W resistor.]
Bucky has a thick metal rod running from tail-bone, through the top of his head.
This provides a strong, weight-bearing mounting ... if you want to hang him from the hook on top of his head.
Unscrew the nut and remove the top of the skull.
Inside the base of the Bucky skull is a plastic disk with a hole through it.
The rod goes up, through this hole, through the top of the skull,
and attaches to a big nut with a hanging loop on it.
Remove it all, and use the Bucky skull for something else.
The metal rod is thick and long.
There's no way that Boris can sit on top of that; the rod would stick through the electronics and batteries.
Actually, there are two rods.
The second one has only a short threaded section poking out.
We cut off the big rod with a hacksaw.
The little threaded stub is what we'll use for mounting Boris.
Bucky comes with a stand.
It has a flat base, and a black plastic "riser" that connects the skull to the base.
The plastic riser has cubical stubs molded into each end.
The riser cubes slip into cubical holes in the base and skull.
The cubes are different sizes: a large cube for the base, and a small one for the skull.
We cut the plastic riser in half and used the peg that fits the Boris skull.
We were going to drill and tap the peg so that it fits on the little threaded rod. Boris gave us some shortcuts: the plastic riser had a hollow space inside that, when cut, exposed a nice pilot hole; we just drilled that a little larger; we didn't bother tapping the hole - the peg was easily force-threaded on the rod.
Here's the Boris mounting peg installed on top of Bucky's spine.
The skull just fits down on the square post.
WARNING: Boris does not tolerate excess power well. I have gotten e-mail and seen newsgroup postings from people who accidently applied too much voltage and damaged Boris. The most common failure is that the jaw stops moving, although other parts may continue to work. I don't know of anybody who has managed to repair a Boris damaged by high voltage. Make sure that you know what you are doing, or stick to batteries.
Unfortunately, the job of running Boris off of 110 VAC is a little more complex than it first appears - Boris takes a big stack of batteries and taps it near the bottom, to provide two different voltages. Worse yet, the stack itself is a little funky - It uses 6 batteries, but not all in series (which would give 9 Volts). Instead, a series/parallel/series arrangement is used to produce 3 Volts at high current and 6 Volts at a lower current.
This is a drawing of the battery box in the Boris skulls that I have:
The left side has three silver tabs that exit the battery box.
The right side has five silver tabs exiting the battery box:
Three close together in the bottom right, and two spaced further apart in the top right.
Here are several general approaches to the problem of operating Boris off line power:
The simplest is to just have two wall warts for the two voltages. In a 9/28/2002 posting to Halloween-L, Jim Kadel suggests a 6 Volt 800 mA and a 3 Volt 300 mA supply.
Please note that "unregulated" wall warts put out a significantly higher voltage when they are not loaded down, or are lightly loaded. If you take this approach, I suggest that you use regulated wall warts.
This approach uses a single wall wart and some external regulators to get the
tap voltage.
See Harry Goodwin's page
http://pages.prodigy.net/bq549/projects/boris.htm
Harry's design can supply up to an amp of 6V and 3V.
He notes power consumption of 6V @ 100 mA, 3V @ 325 mA.
Harry's design gets its power from a 12VDC regulated supply rated at 1A per Boris.
This is a simplification of Harry Goodwin's design.
Instead of making the 6V from an adjustable regulator, it uses a 6-volt fixed regulator.
[If I knew of a fixed 3-volt regulator I would have used that, too, instead of the LM317.]
I have tested this approach and it works fine.
The 3V regulator gets quite hot and must have a heat sink.
The 6V regulator runs cooler, but should probably have a heat sink anyway.
I had a previous version of this design. It powered the 3V regulator from the output of 6V regulator. This means that the 3V regulator has less excess voltage to dispose of, and may not get as hot. But the 6V regulator now has to supply more current, so it would get warmer. I never tried that one, but it would be an interesting experiment.
I am tempted to give each Boris a single regulated
wall wart
rated 6VDC @ 500 mA, add a cap for some more filtering,
but don't add my own 6V regulation.
Feed that straight into the +6VDC input.
Hang a regulator on that to make the +3VDC.
I have not tested this approach.
This is a preliminary draft of how to hook Boris up via Talking Points.
The audio amplifier is a bit cheesie.
We haven't decided what we really want to do there, yet.
Example: You cut off the microphone and hook Boris to your stereo. He doesn't work. Put the microphone back on and see if it works again.
If in doubt as to the angle, put Boris on the plastic stand that came with him.
If that doesn't work, try turning up the volume - slowly, a little at a time.
Even on this setting, sound quality through Boris is poor. Consider silencing the speaker in the skull and sending the audio to some nice little amplified speakers. Please see Improved Audio Quality.
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