Open Animatronics

Cory spend the week working on the green head and came in with it this much progress today:

After that he added the teeth:

Then a new member showed up with an unexpected surprize, a functioning claw!

Cory seemed pleased.

finally we blocked out his profile and attached backpack straps:

I am finishing up a contract at Quinsigamond Community College to set up their FabLab and completed this little guy as a demo of what sort of cool things you can do in the FabLab. He uses the BowlerStudio leg generation cad script and the Bowler kinematics engine for walking. The animatronic head was added, and the whole robot runs off one Teensy 3.2 communication over its USB to BowlerStudio using the BowlerCom library (availible in the arduino libraries)

The script to launch this demo can be found here:

https://gist.github.com/330cdf5997814e56711c680ae3ff0581.git

The prototype for this system's electronics consists of a NodeMCU, a Wiimote nunchuck connector and some servo headers. There is very little in the way of circuit and code here. I have the firmware hosed at:

https://github.com/madhephaestus/Halloween2016

This takes a simple wiimote library and maps it to the servo outputs. I am not using the wifi (yet) so that these wearable animatronics can be powered on and start running right away.

Alex is working on a flattened single PCB version with the same features that should be reasonably easy to assemble in small batches. I am hoping for a first version some time closer to the end of the month. For this years halloween the hand soldered prototypes are good enough!

Cory is a member using the anamatronic head script to make the inside of a Warhammer 40k ork.

I have printed out the first eye and Ben has started sanding and smoothing it out. We have hooked up the right eye to the mechanism and got it moving. It is impressive to see such big eyes whipping around like that!

In this video we can see the basic operation up and running. The pan and tilt on the servos is working. The mouth is also working .