hi all

I plan to have a go at my first really mechanical puppet, what im planing to do is make the puppet talk by having a mechanical mouth and have it hooked up to a cd player so the mouth moves to pre recorded voice. do you think this is possible? 

john

This sounds a little like a lion puppet one way street is selling, so it must be possible. If not, doing the impossible just takes a bit longer-Steve

This actually relatively easy to do. There are a number of kits you can buy through animatronic web sites that will sync your puppet to an MP3 audio file. Some will even sync in real-time to live audio. They look robotic imho and don't work nearly as well as the human hand of course, but it's definitely do-able.

so it is do-able great all i want them for is to police the class room and help me out i was thinking of two police puppets iver side of the room.

andrew do you have any links to those sites :P

Until Andrew can give you his suggestions on websites.... give this a try Google Search.

cool thanks shawn that should get me going

If you're at all skilled in electronics, the book "Mechatronics for the Evil Genius" by Newton Braga has a project for creating a mechatronic talking head. It shows you how to deconstruct sound waves and move the mouth in time with the peaks and valleys. I can't solder my way out of a paper bag, but if I could I'd be all over that project. Just think of the Hallowe'en fun!

J

I am not sure if it would be possible, but perhaps with the Lego mindstorms.
It is a kit to do robotics, you can construct and program the Lego robot with absolute freedom. It has sound sensor, so it should be possible to design a open-close mechanism for the mouth which responded to noise. What I am not sure is if it would be possible to get synchronise with a record or a conversation.

Here is the book at Amazon that was mentioned above... Looks pretty cool!
Link no longer available.