I may buy one to annoy people. lol

At 320.00 USD, its a preety steep price to pay for a creepy head.

I'd be more inclined to buy a 1:1 animatronic Terminator endoskull.

It's a natural fit with the level of technology available today. 

It would roll its red glowing eyes, turn and tilt its head, and gnash its cyber-teeth spouting cliche'd phrases from the three movies.

Put some sensors in it so that it tracks motion in the room. Following it first with the eyes, and then turning the head to center the gaze again.

It would have a Room Guard mode that would challenge those who stray near.

It would have a collection of familiar phrases from the movie.

- Come with me, if you want to live.

- I'll be back.

- Hasta la vista, baby

- My CPU is a neural net processor; a learning computer.

ScottE -- Member (always) & Moderator (when needed)

My response to

"Will you buy an Elivs?"

is

"I'd be more inclined to buy a 1:1 animatronic Terminator endoskull."

For the money being asked for an Elvis, I won't be gutting it to make a Terminator. I'll leave that work to Wowee.

Initially I reasoned that the license fees for the Terminator image and dialouge would be too high, but then I decided that the rights to Elvis likely didn't come cheap, either.

 Another mass media robot that could be done with similar mechanicals and a different shell...

 Johnny 5 from Short Circuit

- Nice Software, hmmmmm

- No disassemble!

- Number 5 is Alive

 A mass media robot that would need very few mechanicals and a simple shell would be C3PO. A swiveling head,and glowing eyes would suffice.

- Oh, dear!

-  I am fluent in over six million forms of communication

- I am C3PO, human-cyborg relations. 

ScottE -- Member (always) & Moderator (when needed)

I think it's a super cool idea. Elvis is AWSOME!

I just bought the Elvis at Wal-Mart. Shock I know since Wal-Mart is not on woo wee's vendor list. I could not resist the $129.95 price tag. although I did go woo wee maina this x-mass with buying almost all of there products they have and ready to hack!!!! yet soo many robots I don't know where to start first. The Elvis is a great looking bot once you put a little powder on his skin to get rid of the shine. Although I think I will start him off like the post I read by putting hiim on a hexapod walker. Just have to get the nerve to open him up. But like they say if it has a screw take it out.

GWJax, To Hack and make mods on robots is a life style and comes natural and not by choice. If a robot has a screw to open it then it must be opened!

Nice Make-up work on your Avatar DetoritGrass, Did you do the mask yourself? If so, we got to talk and set up a sculpting and molding fourm thread for the community. I can't do it all my self. Too much work involved for one person.

GWJax, To Hack and make mods on robots is a life style and comes natural and not by choice. If a robot has a screw to open it then it must be opened!

sweet! To bad you did not do it I was geting my hopes up. Oh well. are you going to give your new creature AI by making your own cpu for the elvis like I'm doing?

GWJax, To Hack and make mods on robots is a life style and comes natural and not by choice. If a robot has a screw to open it then it must be opened!

It's not the wiring that will help you with this problem, the energy save mode is built into the frimware to shut down if not being used. You may want to program a PIC, Basic Stamp 2 or other coprocessor to trigger the remote from the inside to give it no stop talking and singing action. say like for every 2 or 3 talking modes throw in a song and after that leave it in ramdom mode for a while. Have this on a loop and you'll get what you need "no stop action". If you need help with this just let me know on and I'll show you how to do it.
GWJax

GWJax, To Hack and make mods on robots is a life style and comes natural and not by choice. If a robot has a screw to open it then it must be opened!

I don't know a single blessed thing about the Elvis internals, but there's got to be a less drastic (expensive) way of keeping these toys awake than adding a processor to the package.

A simple 555 based timer that pulls a pin high (or low) and resets the poweroff counter would cost less than $5 and require soldering a single connection to whatever that "magic" pin is.

ScottE -- Member (always) & Moderator (when needed)

There are no touch sensors on the Elvis. Now the question is what commands does he want to have for the display. If you send a trigger from the remote, say the volume up command this will keep him alive and not go to sleep, but if you want to add songs and then comments if using the 555 you'll need more than one and then have them timed correctly to sinc with the songs and commentary that the Elvis provies. If cost is an issue then go with a small PIC16F84 which is only arount 2-3 bucks add in the other components then you'r at around 10 bucks max, of course you need something to program the PIC with but a simple programmer can be made cheaply again under 10 bucks. Simple software to program the PIC can be found FREE in the internet.
If you still want to use the 555 timmer and no MCU and still have all the functions then one needs to come up with a timming and shift register combo and misc components which will exceed the 20 dollars than using the PIC assumming that he does not have the parts at all and must buy all components.
this is why I suggested the MCU over the 555 timer for simplisity and ease of use. If someone has a better idea post it and lets debate it to see what is the best approach for this problem.

GWJax, To Hack and make mods on robots is a life style and comes natural and not by choice. If a robot has a screw to open it then it must be opened!