Alright, let me tell you about this Mickey Mouse talking watch project I tackled recently. It wasn’t exactly a walk in the park, but it was fun messing around with it.
It started when I found an old, cheap Mickey watch in a drawer. The kind with the arms pointing to the time. Looked kinda sad just sitting there. Then I thought, wouldn’t it be way cooler if Mickey actually, you know, talked when you checked the time? Seemed like a silly enough idea to try.
Getting Started – The Parts Hunt
First thing was figuring out what I needed. I knew I’d need something small to run it, like a tiny microcontroller. I went with a really small Arduino-compatible board I had lying around. Then, the sound part. I needed a way to store and play audio clips. Found these little MP3 player modules online for cheap, the kind that take a micro SD card. Perfect. Grabbed one of those.
- A tiny microcontroller (some Arduino clone)
- An MP3 player module (like a DFPlayer Mini)
- A micro SD card
- A really, really small speaker
- A tiny rechargeable battery
- Wires, soldering iron, the usual suspects
- The original Mickey watch case (or what was left of it)
Oh, and the voice! That was a bit of a job. Had to find some good Mickey Mouse sound clips. Just needed simple stuff like “The time is…”, numbers, and maybe an “Oh boy!” or a laugh for fun. Scrounged around online, found some audio, and edited them down into tiny files. Put those onto the micro SD card.
Putting It All Together – Wires Everywhere
Next up was the coding. Nothing fancy, really. Just needed the microcontroller to:
- Keep track of the actual time (used a small real-time clock module for this, forgot to list that earlier!).
- Figure out which sound files to play based on the hour and minute.
- Tell the MP3 module to play those specific files through the tiny speaker.
Getting the code working took a bit of trial and error. Making sure it played “Three… Thirty… Five” instead of just random numbers. Debugging was mostly plugging it into my computer and seeing what gibberish it was trying to say.
Then came the real challenge: cramming everything into that tiny watch case. This part? Not fun. The battery was thicker than I thought. The speaker barely fit. The wires were fiddly, kept breaking off when I tried to close the case. Had to desolder and resolder connections more times than I care to admit. It felt like trying to build a ship in a bottle.
Did it Work? Mostly!
After a lot of pushing, prodding, and maybe some swearing, I got the case closed. I charged the little battery up and pressed the button I added (couldn’t reuse the original watch buttons easily).
And… it worked! Sort of. Mickey announced the time! The voice was a bit tinny because of the tiny speaker, but you could understand it. Sometimes it gets the minutes slightly off if I haven’t synced the clock recently, but hey, close enough.
It’s definitely not something I’d wear every day. The battery life isn’t great, and it’s chunkier than the original watch. But hearing Mickey pipe up with “Oh boy! The time is…” still makes me chuckle. It was a silly project, took way longer than expected, involved more frustration than I planned, but I made a thing! And that’s pretty cool.