Creepy Rising Doll Project Page
This project came to me as a referral from someone I did some work for. He bought this "Creepy Rising Doll" animatronic and after some use it stopped working. I looked into replacing the main circuit board, but nobody sells it anymore. So this project will consist of re-creating the circuitry to bring it back to life.
The original operation is shown here: Creepy Rising Doll YouTube
2/10/2021
Here is what I am starting with...
Once again, I think an Atmega 328 will have plenty of processing power to run this animatronic. I'm wiring in a L298N Motor drive controller to control the rising/lowering and the mouth. Here we go!
Got the basic motor wiring and control coding complete!
2/11/2021
A friend pulled the audio track out of the Creeper Doll video...Thank you Bruce! Then loaded the audio into an audio sound board, works great! May even put another sound track in there for a little fun!
2/12/2021
Moved the prototyping board to the animatronic and wired in the existing motor and top/bottom limit switches. Also wired audio board with some temporary speakers. It's Alive!!
Still have to wire and program the eyes and mouth and also the proximity sensor.
2/13/2021
Got the eyes working today, took a little “artistic license” and didn’t use the eye sequence from the original video, this seemed a little more “sinister”. I'm not worred about the motor sound at this point, the motor will have some insulation around it and the prop will have a larger/louder speaker.
Now only have to figure out the mouth and proximity sensor
2/14/2021
Unfortunately, the PIR sensor was not functioning on the animatronic and I could not find an exact replacement. Found a close match on Amazon and ordered it. It should be here in a couple of days, in the meantime will work on a solution for the jaw movement.
2/16/2021
PIR Sensor arrived, used wires from old sensor and wired into circuit, added a little coding and we now have the proximity sensor complete! Temporarily mounted with a wire holding it in place, it will need a custom bracket to firmly mount it to the frame. Looks like it is time for some 3d printing! Now only have the Jaw movement to figure out, this one may be a bit of a challange.
Here it is in action...
2/21/2021
Fired up the 3D printer to print the custom backet for the proximity sensor. Below are the pics of the print in progress, the completed bracket and with a little hot-glue & velcro mounted in the doll.
Also started wiring the audio sync circuit for the jaw (and maybe the eyes) using the MSGEQ7 chip. This chip is often used to sync LED light strips to music. I'm hoping I can seperate out voice frequencies and use that to move the mouth. I need to order some more components for this, so with mail being like it is, it may take a couple of days to get here.
