Triggering Audio Help

Looking in the Picboo manual, it has two types of sounds:
- Ambient
- Scare

The Ambient sound plays while the Picboo is waiting for someone to come along. It's a sort of general background sound, they say to make it pretty long because it will eventually loop, and you don't want people hearing the sound start over. Then when the motion sensor spots someone, the Picoboo plays a "scare" sound.

The "scares" are one way you could have have the skull talk. However, the limitation is that while you can record up to 10 scare sounds and have the Picboo play them one at a time when it is triggered, the total time for all the scare sounds added together seems to be two minutes (that's what I get from their manual). If you give your skull a bunch of short phrases then that would work out well. I don't know the song you're referring to, but songs by themselves are usually about three to four minutes long.

There's no point in getting the Cowlacious Audio Board - that just duplicates what's already inside the Picboo, including the ability to have it trigger other props. The Cowlacious Audio Board only seems to be able to play one phrase back and does not have the ambient sound feature (but then it's less expensive, too.)

The other thing to watch out for - the skull you got in the kit is a "Bucky" skull, and those are pretty heavy. They look great because they are originally designed to teach anatomy. The problem may be putting it on top of a skeleton body and keeping it in place while the whole thing rocks back and forth. I have one of those, I had to make a PVC stand to hold it up.

If you can hold the skull in place, and then rest of the skeleton doesn't hold the weight and is just for show, then the rocking shouldn't interfere with the servo. You may need to use some heavy zip ties and some sort of shawl to hide them.

But, I really like your idea of having her rocking, stop and say something, and then go back to rocking.

Here are some technical terms...if a relay is Normally Closed, it means the connection is closed. The circuit is complete, power flows, and the light or motor or whatever is on. When the relay is triggered, the connection is broken and the light or motor turns off. Connecting to a relay the other way, using the Normally Open side, means that the light, motor, etc is off because the circuit is open. Triggering the relay closes the circuit and power flows to the light or motor, turning it on.

For the ambient rocking effect, you'll want to connect to one relay on the Picboo using "Normally Closed" so that the motor rocking the chair is on, and then when the scare is triggered it turns off. You will use the NC and C connectors on the relay (which stand for "Normally Closed" and "Common").

For a light that comes on for the scare, use the NO and C on the other relay ("Normally Open" and "Common").

If you look closely at the pictures of the Picboo, on the upper left corner it says "Relay Outputs" and the connections are labelled NC, C and NO. The Picboo manual explains this a bit in the section called "Wiring the outputs."