Mr. Skully was first constructed for Halloween 2006. The first-generation consisted of a Bucky skull (a birthday gift from my wife!), 3 servos, one voice changer, an audio-based server controller, a concrete cinder block and a lot of decorative coverups (including dark red foam, ripped up and placed in the top of the skull to look like some sort of brains).
The “voice changer” was just one of those cheap models you buy with a built-in speaker and microphone with a 6’ supply of cable. To make this more workable with Mr. Skully, I extended the cable length to 50’ and added an audio-out port to drive an externally-powered speaker (behind Mr. Skully’s head) as well as the servo controller for this mouth. The original mini-speaker was kept so I could hear what the audio being sent outside from my performance area sounded like.
Here’s how the first-generation of Mr. Skully performed on Halloween night, 2006:
We had some unexpected difficulties with the first Mr. Skully. The biggest one was the fact that the servo for the neck was just too small to handle the weight of the bucky. This problem was only going to get worse over time as I really wanted to add the skull cap back to his head as well as add some lights for his eyes.
For 2007, I updated Mr. Skully to address the weight issue and added some other changes:
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• I gave up on the tilt servo and replaced it a fixed-angle block, which gave Mr. Skully better support and stability overall (allowing me to even put his skull cap back on!)
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• I added UV LED lights and Uranium glass for the eyes
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• I rewired Mr. Skully so the side-to-side servo and eyes would be driven off a power supply (versus batteries which always gave out before the night was over)
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• I made some other minor aesthetic changes to better hide the next assembly
With that, Mr. Skully 2.0 was ready for Halloween 2007. Here’s him talking to the camera (minus his voice changer) in the summer of 2007:
