Sing-A-Ma-Jig is a creepy toy!

Holy crap, I can’t believe they make this thing for kids! Even without the molestache(which I printed out), it’s still creepy.  It’s also quite ripe for bending. The thing is called a Sing-A-Ma-Jig, and I got mine at target while in NYC a few weeks back. I even opened it up that night and just used my fingers to see if it was bendable, and it is indeed.

This post is something that should have been posted yesterday, but I sort of started hanging out with my roommates. Then beers got involved, and then motivation was thoroughly lost. The previous two days was a combination of sleep deprivation, workshop preparation, visiting of friends, and travel. Seriously, I didn’t do anything creative for those two days, and I was running on only a few hours of sleep a night. That really tends to sap my creative energy. I’ll post a few projects after the month is over to make up for it.

This post is about the exploration of the toy, and how I go about finding fun points to bend. I made a quick video, and I also uploaded a bunch of pics to my Flickr. Behold, the first video:

This thing is fun right away. Really sensitive to touch, which means that it will be easy to bend.

This was actually fairly easy to take apart, but you do have to snip the threads at the top of the battery compartment. Behind the head you’ll find the two screws you’ll need to remove the electronics:

Those two holes at the top right and left are what you are looking for. Next there are four on the front of the case you’ll have to remove:

I’ve removed the four at this point. The plastic piece on top can be taken off as a single piece. You’ll then be left with the speaker to deal with:

Save that metal bar in the middle, otherwise you won’t be able to keep the strange mouth movement. Honestly, the mouth movement is half of what makes this thing creepy.

I’ve removed the hot glue that covered most of the electronics so that I can give it the bad touch. For interesting toys, I draw a map of the circuit.

This is my note page filled with info. At the time of the video, only things above “Bends” were really written down. Then the second half has the info for bend point one.

I found that bend point one responded really well with a 1Meg pot. Point1 is connected to the middle position of the pot, with +3V going to the left position, and GND going to the right position. I also found that it responded well with a photo-resistor, and I used a 2k-2M one. I generally tune my toys as well, which is what the 22k resistors are about.

What I mean by tuning, is that I try and find both the high and low end that the toy crashes. I start with a large pot (like 1 Meg), and find that spot. I then remove the pot and measure it with a multimeter. Then I lower to an appropriate pot and continue to fine tune it. If the crash value is 10k, I’m not going to use a 500k, but a 100k or 50k. In this case I got +57k and -39k, so I used a 100k pot. Then I found the value of +-24k. The closest resistor value I had was 22k, so 22k it was.

I’ll put touch contacts in behind the 22k resistors, as going below that doesn’t help at all. I’ll also get up the next post fairly shortly, as I’ve already completed it. Like I said, this should have been posted last night.