A while back my lovely wife got me this Big Lebowski keychain. I’m not sure why but when I started thinking about what kind of pumpkin to carve this year the keychain popped into my mind. I took it apart to see how easy it would be to mod and I was pleased to see its internals were quite simple.
I had picked up a PING))) ultrasonic sensor recently so I wired up the Lebowski chip and the PING))) to my recently constructed Boarduino to get a motion detecting Dude with 6 sayings.
I figured if I was going to use this for a jack-o-latern I needed a visual component so I wired up four RGB LEDs and diffused them with a pingpong ball (the soldering for this nearly killed me). Initially I was going to figure out how long each sound clip played so I could do a visual display that would coordinate with the audio but then I realized I could just use one of the analog i/o pins on the Arduino to trigger the lights when the sounds were playing. This created a nice visual effect that went well with the audio.
Here’s what happened.
jeffelmore.org 