Thread: Anybody use the Picotalk?

Tweet

http://www.frightprops.com/controlle...lers-0861.html

I was thinking about getting this for my animated skulls that I've never got around to doing. I'm wondering how well it does with the actual syncing, and how it would do if i make the head turn left/right instead of the eyes. It says you can do more of a sweeping motion, which is what I'd want, but I'm on the boarder line with it now.

Any thoughts?
-Eric

I am interested in getting a Dual to control two connected skulls. The PicoTalk looks small and compact, and the enclosure means no accidentally broken parts when placed in the skull. From the documentation, it looks like it should be pretty easy to set up the panning motion.

yes, I agree about ease of programming.

I wonder how good it is with recognizing the voice, and the servo responding to it.

-Eric

I used a picotalk this past Halloween and was very happy with it. The syncing was very good and the eye movement is also adjustable. I didn't use the sweeping motion as I liked the spontaneous random eye movement but I did try it out. It was responsive to the voice and works even better if you can use a tone track.

It's definitely a quality piece of gear.

Awesome! Tone track?

Sounds like I know what I'm getting this year! lol. How did you do your audio? Did you just hit play, or did you use the boo tunes too?

-Eric

I didn't use a tone track myself for this but it's just a series of tones beyond the human audible range. You set these up in an audio editor and sync them to the voice. It typically works better than using just the spoken audio for synchronization. Here is a video on how to create a tone track. It's originally for the Scary Terry servo board but it will work with th PT too.

Tone Track video

I had a CAP board hooked up to a PIR sensor so it triggered when someone walked near the coffin where it was set up.

CAP board

I would also be interested if anybody has used the second picotalk function for a neck panning motion instead of eyes -- and how they set up their neck mechanism. A panning neck, or even a neck randomly jerking left to right just seems scarier than the random eyes. (Although the random eyes are cool.)

I was looking at the Frightideas/Frightprops skull and it does seem like for that price you could buy a scary terry and rig a neck panning mechanism. That is, if I knew how to do it and where to get the parts I needed, me being an electronics dumkopf.

2 months later -- apparently nobody has ever used the neck panning function