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Showing posts from April, 2019

Week 5

Plans: Assemble 3D printed spine Assemble head and jaw of alien + attach the servo to rotate jaw Test the audio Paint the latex alien body Code the motors, servos, and audio for timing Research how to make a winch for spring activation Pseudo code flowchart: Audio:

Week 4

Plans: start building the box for the alien, possibly using laser cutting Research servo linkages for the swaying motion of alien Buy servo linkages Experiment with a slinky for the body of the alien Sherry: start latex molding/experimenting wire up speaker system  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9T-X2b4bsWc Shawn: construction of the box Rj: 3D printing CAD the slinky backbone Yelnur: Pseudo code for: Jaw (servo) Spring activator (motor) Audio https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1CdC5gzTxY&t=24s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTXi6kYg0D4 Swaying motion (servo)

Week 3

Plans: Changed alien launch mechanism to spring activation rather than a motor activation Start 3D print design by creating CAD of alien head and jaw mechanism Head of alien Jaw of alien Latex molding research and then bought the latex https://youtu.be/iFHYwuR7GXs Sound board research https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1CdC5gzTxY Created and imported audio file using audacity

Week 2

During the second week, we made more concrete decisions on the mechanisms of the animatronic and drew another sketch of the alien with more details. We also started to practice coding on the Arduino by learning how to turn a LED on and off. Sketch: Programming: Arduino Electrical board: Arduino Mechanisms: 90 degree turn, propping alien from horizontal position to vertical position Stepper motor: programmed to QUICKLY turn by 90 degrees Instead of using a piston which would be more complicated, we could set a stepper motor to a higher speed to get that quick jumpscare effect. Youtube video below is an example of a high speed stepper. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4rRS8VoC3UM Swaying motion (back and forth) Stepper motor: connect to wheel. Connect stiff rod to off-center position on wheel. Connect wheel to alien, similar to train wheel motion https://youtu.be/78Rl6BWoQp0?t=47 Spinning head 180 degrees both ways Stepper motor: loca

Week 1

During the first week of the animatronics engineering design recitation/lecture, groups assembled and brain stormed ideas for the mechanism they wanted to build. Our group came up with a rough idea of an alien popping out of the human torso, inspired from the chest bursting scene from the "Alien" movie. We started to fill out a design proposal which made us think about what kind of motors and materials we needed to build. We wanted: an alien inside the torso to have glowing red eyes spin around pop up and down quickly give the human torso a head with facial features making the human scream as the alien popped out     We were very ambitious on the first day because after we met in lab the next day, we realized that we wanted to do too many things. Moving the alien in an erratic manner was already a complicated operation, but getting a human head to create facial expressions on top of that was out of the scope of time we had. During the lab, we focused on mini