Bone Maestro

Me and my family are obsessed with Halloween, and I love product experimentation. The Home Depot Ultra Skelly is fun out of the box — but the stock app stops short of what the hardware feels capable of.

I wanted to push that animatronic past default modes into something more expressive and programmable: clearer controls, custom performances, and room to experiment with voice and character.

• Designing clearer mobile controls for motion, audio, lighting, and related states.
• Learning the skeleton’s Bluetooth behavior with a sniffer and a community web controller — treating every command as a candidate until verified.
• Testing custom scenes for programmable performances.
• Exploring ideas for AI voice, text-to-speech, and conversational modes (roadmap, not shipped).
• Documenting technical research and protocol notes along the way.

Bone Maestro is a SwiftUI-based iOS app for controlling the Home Depot Ultra Skelly. The focus is a clearer control surface for Bluetooth connection, animatronic status, and the core performance channels: audio, lighting, and motion.

The app supports custom scenes, volume control, mouth sync, and light controls — treating the skeleton less like a one-shot gag and more like a programmable performer.

• Hardware UX needs more clarity than software-only products — connection state, latency, and physical feedback have to stay visible.
• Experimentation works better when knowns are separated from assumptions, then tested and documented.
• AI tools help most when paired with strong design judgment, not when they replace it.