meet Moostar, the fortune-telling Moose inspired by Zoltar. You remember Zoltar, the coin operated fortune-teller who made [Tom Hanks] a rich motion picture star? maybe you didn’t see that flick, but [Sketchsk3tch] did and he pulled this show piece together for a company-wide conference with relative ease.
If you’re good at choosing parts for your projects it makes things a lot simpler. He started with a singing Christmas moose, a tiny plasma ball to act as the crystal ball, and somehow came across a collector’s basketball case which was the best size for the enclosure.
The electronics also came together remarkably well. He uses a thermal printer to spit out the fortunes — which are actually safety ideas for employees considering that that’s the dcpartment he works in. The coin acceptor is a Sparkfun part and he tried two ready made options to make the moose talk. The first is seen below and uses pre-recorded messages played by an Arduino Wave shield. This was improved upon by using an EMIC2 text-to-speech module that really opens up the moose’s range of chatter.