I've been thinking that it would be awesome to make your own lines and/or sound effects that go with your projects.

Lately, Hasbro has been protecting their voice chips by either molding them into the toy itself or adding a ceramic casing (haven't checked it myself. A buddy told me that).

I doubt that there is any way "inside" of those things. My best bet in getting your own audio in there is by reverse-engineering the chips inside, locating the sound data and replacing that with your own, burn that onto a custom IC and get that attached to the hardware again.

Does anyone have any experience with this? And if so, a tutorial would be awesome  

 

I've been brainstorming on this concept for quite some time. It is the biggest reason why I haven't finished my Predaking 2.0 'bash.  

I have been pooling resources and parts to make it happen, and I believe the easiest way to do so (that I have devised thus far) is to use a Hallmark voice-recording greeting/holiday card and then use it inside your kitbash. The electronics fit within a foldable card, so the mass is manageable.

- Alty

 

Thats a interesting idea, I would had not ever thought of that  .

On a side note, if the figure is large enough you might be able to fit an arduino in the figure, then use it to program in a voice and light sequence. Then again you gotta have quite a bit of technical knowledge to pull it off, but im sure someone could pull it off. It may even be possible to put in motors and ect this way to, depending on the size of the figure.

But I like your idea better because like you said its more than likely really easy to fit the components of those cards in a figure, and it doesn't require extensive technical knowledge to pull off  

Plus if you solder a headphone jack onto where the mic goes then you could even directly record sound from a sound file on your pc!

 

I was thinking of using an Arduino Uno to make a programmable sound machine similar to the old Rom space Knight toy, but fit it into G1 Shockwave. Anyone else ever tried that?

 

Okay I am new to programming the Arduino, but I took a crack at making a simple program that works like the old Rom toy, where there are two buttons, and you press them in patterns of 4 presses, allowing up to 16 effects to be triggered.

It starts a countdown when you press either button. Pressing the 8 button adds 1 (or 2, 4 or 8) to the effect result and stepping up the counter, while pressing the 9 button does not add to the effect but still steps up. The result is every time you press a combination of 4 buttons within a time limit you will get a result from 0 to 15. if you press less than 4 times inside the time limit, it restart, so pressing 4 buttong over a long period won't trigger an effect at all.

I could probably optimizer the 8 "if" statements into sometimes smaller if I spent time on it, but this got the job done.

The board is a simple Uno set with switched that go high when you press buttons on digital input lines 8 and 9. If have to press the buttons 4 times within a certain number of steps or it times out and starts over.

Right now there is no action other than it outputting to the serial monitor the words "Sound 1", "Sound 2", etc.

Here is the simple circuit on a breadboard.


Here is the serial monitor in action: