Meet Wampus - a $20 Target-store-exclusive resin cat figurine with built in leds and a small motor. In his factory configuration Wampus makes a zombie-cat screech noise and moves his head for about 40 seconds every time he senses movement via an piezo sensor.

At this point, Wampus is a priceless resin cat (because I'd rather not calculate the BOM + labor costs of "upgrading" him).

Several variations of Wampus' hardware have been created, starting with an external breadboard, ESP8266 and, most recently, an ESP32C6 (Seeed studio XIAO). Initially I hooked Wampus' motor power to the ESP8266, meaning that whenever the motor was triggered, the ESP8266 would turn on - this allowed the original sensor to trigger the audio output. However, even with the original sound set to mute via the attached switch, some of the audio would play as a result of interesting grounding or something.

Newer versions of Wampus are largely seperate from the original logic board and sensors. Instead of the piezo sensor, I've opted to use an accelerometer switch attached to a DIN of the ESP32. The I2C amplifier is powered off via it SD pin, and power to the included LEDs and motors is routed through a mosfet triggered by the ESP. No more double audio.

I'll upload pictures of Wampus and some of the board variations shortly.