Giving Billy Bass the arti-fish-al intelligence he all the time deserved

Should you have been unfortunate sufficient to go to a giant field retail retailer or goofy uncle’s residence across the flip of the century, you’ll have undoubtedly come throughout a Large Mouth Billy Bass. That’s an animatronic fish that wiggles on a plaque whereas older, very licensable hit songs play. However whereas ol’ Billy was wildly fashionable on the time and spawned an entire new market phase, he wasn’t very refined. Tony–Okay determined to handle these cognitive shortcomings by giving Billy Bass an ‘arti-fish-al intelligence’ improve.

Internally, the unique Large Mouth Billy Bass is kind of easy. It has a single electrical motor that drives the animatronic motion by way of a plastic mechanism, with an inexpensive sound chip that has Al Inexperienced’s “Take Me to the River” burned in. Tony–Okay’s modification provides the person full management over the whole lot, to allow them to program no matter habits they like and use any audio. Utilizing an ordinary infrared distant management, the person can activate these programmed sequences. If desired, Billy might be switched again to his regular routines.

Tony–Okay achieved that utilizing two Arduino UNO Rev3 boards. One handles motor management, whereas the opposite performs audio. Tony–Okay selected to do this so he may use a motor driver protect with one Arduino and an SD card protect with the opposite. This takes benefit of the TMRpcm library, which makes it doable to play PCM and WAV recordsdata with out a devoted audio DAC (digital-to-analog converter). The audio high quality gained’t be stellar, however it’s adequate for this objective.

What to play all comes right down to the builder’s potential to suppose up fish-related puns. If yow will discover a strategy to incorporate a Jimmy Buffett tune, you’ll be golden!