Making Toys

Shaking music maker, Elmo+Cookie Monster

Title: 2 of the super stars of Sesame Street
Description: Just simply press Elmo’s nose then flip or shake the stick to make giggling and silly sounds of Elmo and Cookie Monster.

Title: HA HA HA HA
Description: Apparently this toy attempts to make people laugh. At least I was enjoying playing with it.

Title: SESAME WORKSHOP
Description: I just tried to record every text it has on its plastic shell. Everything looked good except the material of this sound maker is not recyclable. If they could use Eco-friendly materials, that would be great!

Title: Dissection
Description: Inside Elmo’s brain is the place of putting batteries. By looking at little holes on Cookie Monster’s head, we can infer that they put a speaker here.

Title: Let’s see what’s in its body
Description: Every components are placed stably and neatly in the stick-shaped plastic shell. The nose is bound with a mode switch which I’ll show later.

Title: Stay orderly
Description: Sensors and switches are covered and fixed with plastic lids. In the right bottom picture, two of wires were soldered to connect the batteries.

Title: Mode switch
Description: By pressing this tiny button, I could change the mode of music.

In mode 1 – giggling of Elmo and Cookie Monster
In mode 2 – silly sounds
In mode 3 – brisk music

Title: Power switch
Description: This little switch is used to control the state of power supply.

0 – cut off the connection with batteries.
1 – turn on!

Title: Its heart
Description: The front view of the circuit board. Wires are hidden behind the board.

Title: Turn around
Description: There are two capacitors on the back and wires are fastened with hot glue.

Title: Time to make some music!
Description: This is the sensor detecting the toy’s movement and triggering the chip to play music. There are total 2 sensors inside, one is used to trigger Elmo’s giggling while another one is to trigger Cookie Monster’s.

Title: Done!
Description: These are all the components of the toy include a narrow strip of tape to hold wires.

After all the work, I put those electronic parts into a sock monkey that I sewed as a prototype of my final project toy. Monkey toy would make sounds when it is shook. And monkey’s nose is the mode switch. Basically, it does the same thing as the elmo music maker but with a soft "container".