Thread: Converting a Gemmy "try me" button to always on?

Tweet

Greetings,

I have a 5' crawling girl from Spirit. By default, she has 2 settings. One is sensor, the other is "on". "On" doesn't mean she is always running - it means that you can press the manual button on her arm and she will then go at it.

What I want to do is modify her so that the "on" really does mean always on. That way, I can control her activation via power (I have an outlet that I can control remotely). Is this easily done? Is it even possible?

What I've tried:

I tried cutting the 2 wires connected to the button and splicing them together. This did not work.

Bueller...Bueller?

Someone has to know the answer to this...I'll add my voice as yet another newbie to hacking the electronics in Gemmys that could REALLY use this pearl of information.

I have a Gemmy Drop-Down Skull that I did exactly the same thing with...cut the two wires to the button...spliced them together...and nothing.

Yeah, I was a little surprised that nobody has the answer to this. Maybe people just don't check this section of the forum much - I'm sure somebody knows how to do it.

I'm leading people through our haunted house personally, so it would really help to be able to trigger props through a wireless outlet on/off controller instead of the sensor (or worse, having to walk up to the prop and pinch its arm). The sensor is unreliable anyway due to the lighting conditions.

I've found that it takes the motion of the button being pressed and released to trigger em, or so it seems. An easier solution i have used is one of those blinking xmas bulbs, ya know the ones with the red stripe that come with the string of lights. You can wire that up to a 3-6 volt wall wart and then control that with your wireless controller. Hope that helps.

Thanks, frugal ghoul.

My solution at this point is to put the prop on "ON" and use a strobe to trigger the prop's sensor.

I had PLANNED on hooking the "try me" wires to a 120v DPDT relay plugged into an X10 appliance module. Using that, I could then use a X10 remote to turn on/off the strobe AND the prop at the same time. The net effect of using the strobe to trigger the prop is a momentary delay before the skull animates, but it's still pretty acceptable.

Hopefully, more people have solved this and we'll get more solutions that we can mull over and pick between.

I build a walk through haunted house in my garage each year and last year I bought some of the animatronic props from Spirit Halloween store, Menards etc and found that when in the dark with only black lights the sensors for auto triggering them do not work reliably.

I'm kicking myself this year because when I went to Spirit at the end of last season they had a bunch of the big red 'Try Me' buttons from their displays with long wires too, and I forgot to ask if they would give or sell them to me as the displays were already sold.

I've got to believe these are just low voltage simple circuits that you would build from parts at Radio Shack or something. I'm going to try this in the next couple of weeks, if I have any success I'll share.

Last year what I did was set up strobes in the displays and this just constantly triggered them but it's not as nice as if they go off when the person approaches.

Good to know I'm not the only one.

It turns out that using X10 to trigger the strobes remotely works double-duty to sound-activate my skull. The click of the appliance module when it switches on makes a noise loud enough to register.

..so for ONCE, that sound is useful, instead of just annoying!

(still would prefer direct control. Hope you figure it out!)