Inside Elvis

Lets have a look at the inside of an Elvis head.

Well….I wasn’t able to get one on Ebay for under $500 because they are so much in demand by electronics hackers and I suppose Elvis fans.

Its a fairly close to real size head animatronic toy from the Wowwee company (makers of the Robosapien and many great robot toys).

It has a remote control and a microphone so that it can sing some Elvis hits and talk (in Elvis’s actual recorded voice) and move its mouth and eyes and neck.

Most of these toys along with the Wowwee animatronic monkey head have broken down over the years but some are still kicking around.

A really great site by GWJax called the Elivinator, has about 30 pages showing him taking apart the Elvis head and swapping out a few boards and programming it using an older form of Basic called PBasic using some hardware called the Parallax Basic stamp. https://www.instructables.com/WowWees-Elvis-Alive-to-The-Elivinator-Project/ He actually made his own D/A board (digital/analog) that he programmed

Its great to see how one goes about dismantling the hair and skin from an old robot and giving it a new robot-life.

Other users have experimented with these toys and added other types of microcontrollers like the Arduino.

This is a a different doll but the principles are similar. Its called the Cricket doll. It is similar in some ways to the Elvis bust. More to say later.

Here are some links to sites that work on the Elvis head from WoWwee.

Def Wheezer https://www.youtube.com/user/defwheezer