"BEING A ZOMBIE IS A DEAD END JOB"
diversion from The Artists Assistant and the Boy / The Boy
The talking zombie skull had haunted my workshop for a few years, smashed in an unwise act three years ago, when the boy was a toddler.
Zombie skull was a lovely piece of work. The exterior was suitably horrible, rotting bone tinged with livid green, a very good rendition. Inside was a motor mechanism to work the jaw, two green LEDS for eyes, a small speaker ported through a grill at the base, a piezoelectric chip, and a sound chip on a pc board. The shaft of the motor drive had been bent, the leads to the piezo knocked off, the circuit board snapped, and the screw posts securing the halves together snapped.
Better still, the wiring looked like it had been done by a careless hobbyist. It could have been me! Big blobs of solder, wires bundled and stuffed onto whatever solder pad worked..
The piezoelectric chip fooled me for a while, then disappointed. If there was already a speaker, why the need for the piezo? Could it be a vibration sensor? But it never seemed to actually start the voice chip.
As best I could tell, it simply flashed the LEDS for the eyes when the skull was tapped. Sort of like you would expect from Bob the skull, from Dresden files.
Those things put out! And LEDS take very little power. An LED directly across the piezo would light (faintly) when you tap it!
However, I wanted LASER EYES. Replacing the fly-back diode on the motor with the LEDS got a REALLY BRIGHT flashing eyes in time with the speaking. Cool.
There was enough room in there to fit an Nvidia Nano (Think raspberry pi with a GPU), and that possibility consumed a lot of my mental space. One might also re-program the sound chip, it looked like the pads were exposed, if only I could find more data about it.
The repaired skull, along with a chocolate bunny (how many kids get zombie skulls for Easter?!), also had a small box with it, with another sound chip, that played back 'The Head Poem'.
I'm sorry I got angry
I guess I lost my head
It really doesn't matter
I'll borrow yours, instead
The process will be simple
and it will not hurt at all
in the meantime you can borrow
my brother's basketball!
I had thought to add a reference to Egils's Saga and the famous Icelandic head poem, but that would have been silly. This strange rhyme above is quite a bit more what I like to think a head-ransom poem should be! Though I imagine Erick Blood-Axe might turn it against the poet in some grim fashion.