As seen on Show and Tell! Thanks to Virgil for sharing his project on show and tell! Read the full tutorial for the build here.
In 1978, I bought a wind-up donkey for my daughter, then an infant. The donkey moved its head while playing “Donkey Serenade.” I figured that I could replicate that with an Arduino, a motor, sound on an SD card, and a speaker. It took me 10 weeks, but I did it. Here’s the story.
I got sidetracked for a while doing my Halloween Candy Cauldron, which came out of this one. While I was working on the donkey, learning about playing sound with an Arduino, I began seeing lots of Halloween projects on Adafruit shows, so I decided to try my hand on Halloween sounds.
This was an incredibly rewarding project that was challenging, fun, interesting, and educational—all the reasons I wanted to start with Arduino in the first place!
Featured Adafruit Products!
Adafruit Pro Trinket – 3V 12MHz: Trinket’s got a big sister in town – the Pro Trinket 3V! Pro Trinket combines everything you love about Trinket with the familiarity of the core Arduino chip, the ATmega328. It’s like an Arduino Pro Mini with more pins and USB tossed in.
Trinket’s a year old now, and while its been great to see tons of tiny projects, sometimes you just need more pins, more FLASH, and more RAM. That’s why we designed Pro Trinket, with 18 GPIO, 2 extra analog inputs, 28K of flash, and 2K of RAM. Read more.
Adafruit 16-Channel 12-bit PWM/Servo Driver – I2C interface – PCA9685: You want to make a cool robot, maybe a hexapod walker, or maybe just a piece of art with a lot of moving parts. Or maybe you want to drive a lot of LEDs with precise PWM output. Then you realize that your microcontroller has a limited number of PWM outputs! What now? You could give up OR you could just get this handy PWM and Servo driver breakout. Read more.