I had a dream of developing an animated Christmas Holiday Season display, potentially as a fund raiser for the arts. My original idea was to use puppets as characters, but reading and investigating made me curious as to whether I could build an animatronic penguin.
This instructable concentrates on the torso, which has four degrees of freedom, allowing the figure to move about in many directions. As a goal, I wanted a penguin that could "dance".
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The body skeleton was made of model aircraft plywood, with homemade servo brackets of 1/2" square strip wood. I used the following items in the construction of the torso
The tools I used were:
- 4 sheets of 12x24 3mm plywood
- ? 24" lengths of 1/2" square poplar stripwood (I bought out the craft store's supply!)
- 4 HITEC HS422 servos
- 1 6" Servo extension cable
- 2 10" Servo extension cables
- 6" Ball 2/56 threaded rod
- 4 pair Ball Link sets
- 4 Aluminum servo horns
- 8 3/4" RC aircraft Hinges
- Scrap aluminum angle
- Miscellaneous small screws, nuts and bolts.
The tools I used were:
- Saber Saw
- Flat head and Phillips screwdrivers
- Cutoff Saw
- Drill press
- Portable drill
- Gorilla glue
- ACC glue (super glue)
- small Spray bottle of water
- Clothes pins
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He does 'talk' as well, with a circuit that synchronizes the mouth movements to audio input.
It can be controlled via an Internet connection as well, giving some remote control xapabilities. In fact, a friend and I are developing an iPhone application that will serve as a remote control device.
I have been in discussions with a Boston area puppeteer, who is planning on making the skin for me. This is supposed to be a cortoonish character. The skin will be foam-based with a cloth covering.
It requires first a knowledge of the FreeBASIC (FB) programming language. It will only work on a Windows system, in its current incarnation. Also in order to compile it, the FB network library for Windows needs to be customized...
Secondly, the actual program implements a new programming language in interpretive mode. This language is pre-processed into an intermediate token format. I call this language A-Code. So using the program would also entail learning A-code as well. There currently no documentation for A-Code, although I have not ruled out creating such in the future.
So my answer is that I am not supplying the software at this time, since it is not in a form such that it could be used by anyone.
My apologies,
dj
Do you mean the plywood tab I am using to mount the electronics? But that is contained within his body...