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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 minimizing our ideas while still making it exciting.
    We brainstormed what kind of motors and mechanisms we should use for the robot and whether or not we should use Arduino or Raspberry pi. We initially wanted to use pneumatic pistons to launch the alien out of the torso, but later found out how expensive and complicated they were. As for the language and electrical board we wanted to use, we ended up choosing Arduino. We finalized some design decisions while wrapping up the design proposal due next week.

Rough sketch



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