OB10
Sr Member
So for the last 7 years or so, the Trek club I'm in, the USS Nokomis, has turned 2 hotel rooms into 2 rooms from the original Enterprise for CONvergence, the local big con. For many of those years, I've wanted to have some plants from Talos IV (The Cage/Menagerie). (We have one room set up as the Terran Empire room (Mirror Mirror), which has the bar, an Agony Booth, a Tantalus Field, Sargon, and lots of decorations behind the bar. The other room is dressed out as a Federation Rec Room, with food slots, 3 sided monitor, Burke style chairs, and appropriate tables and benches. In front of one room is a Captain's chair, and the other has a 3 person Transporter pad (with the proper funkadelic backing reflector material).)
Well, I finally got around to it. Not quite as fancy as I was hoping, but I think they turned out fine. I've got a $15 MP3 recorder from Menards and a $10 MP3 speaker from Target playing a looped track of the alien planet sound from classic Trek. The "real" plants sort of vibrate, producing the sound. When Pike and Spock grasp the leaves, the sound changes. I was going to have some little pager/cell phone motor vibrators keep the leaves vibrating. I sort of ran out of time, and the potentiometer I was gonna use didn't have the range I was looking for... it was almost all on, or off. Plus the wire I used probably wouldn't have had the rigidity for holding the vibrators and leaves up; the leaves got wilted looking enough on their own. If I'd taken a little more time, I maybe could have hidden the vibrators under the excelsior, and wired several of the stems together to get them to all move with fewer vibrators. I also thought about going to Walgreens and grabbing a small battery powered fan and trying to hide that, since the smallest air movement caused the leaves to move. But by then, I didn't care.
The styrofoam disk I used as the base for the sound FX and to stick the stems into was too small, so I glued a couple circles of foam core together. That worked fine, and was plenty strong, until you moved the pot around very much. Then, the thing foamcore would teeter, then totter, and the MP3 player and speaker would try to fall through into the bottom of the pot. :rolleyes I'm planning on gluing on a strip of foamcore to make the disk "thicker" and harder to dump over. I covered the sound FX and foamcore up with some excelsior I got in Michaels' floral department. The stems were floral wire from Michaels, and I've noticed that there is heavier wire available. The leaves are cut from paper bags, and painted with out of the bottle acrylic craft paint. It kinda looks like the original leaves were made with a pourable plastic film that was popular in artsy/craftsy areas back then. I didn't want to bother to find that, and I figured the paper bags would be more rugged.
One of the pics is from the con, sitting next to our Horta. And yeah, it's looking kinda bedraggled. The plant, that is. The other was from our shop. I took the plant to the weekly Twin Cities Maker meeting, and left the plant in a couple places. The sound wasn't deafening, but it was subtley noticeable, so after awhile people started asking about it. "I thought I was hearing that Star Trek sound, and it sorted freaked me out."
Mission accomplished.
Well, I finally got around to it. Not quite as fancy as I was hoping, but I think they turned out fine. I've got a $15 MP3 recorder from Menards and a $10 MP3 speaker from Target playing a looped track of the alien planet sound from classic Trek. The "real" plants sort of vibrate, producing the sound. When Pike and Spock grasp the leaves, the sound changes. I was going to have some little pager/cell phone motor vibrators keep the leaves vibrating. I sort of ran out of time, and the potentiometer I was gonna use didn't have the range I was looking for... it was almost all on, or off. Plus the wire I used probably wouldn't have had the rigidity for holding the vibrators and leaves up; the leaves got wilted looking enough on their own. If I'd taken a little more time, I maybe could have hidden the vibrators under the excelsior, and wired several of the stems together to get them to all move with fewer vibrators. I also thought about going to Walgreens and grabbing a small battery powered fan and trying to hide that, since the smallest air movement caused the leaves to move. But by then, I didn't care.
The styrofoam disk I used as the base for the sound FX and to stick the stems into was too small, so I glued a couple circles of foam core together. That worked fine, and was plenty strong, until you moved the pot around very much. Then, the thing foamcore would teeter, then totter, and the MP3 player and speaker would try to fall through into the bottom of the pot. :rolleyes I'm planning on gluing on a strip of foamcore to make the disk "thicker" and harder to dump over. I covered the sound FX and foamcore up with some excelsior I got in Michaels' floral department. The stems were floral wire from Michaels, and I've noticed that there is heavier wire available. The leaves are cut from paper bags, and painted with out of the bottle acrylic craft paint. It kinda looks like the original leaves were made with a pourable plastic film that was popular in artsy/craftsy areas back then. I didn't want to bother to find that, and I figured the paper bags would be more rugged.
One of the pics is from the con, sitting next to our Horta. And yeah, it's looking kinda bedraggled. The plant, that is. The other was from our shop. I took the plant to the weekly Twin Cities Maker meeting, and left the plant in a couple places. The sound wasn't deafening, but it was subtley noticeable, so after awhile people started asking about it. "I thought I was hearing that Star Trek sound, and it sorted freaked me out."
Mission accomplished.
