Skip to main content

Background/Tutorial/FAQ

Background

The team decided to go with a horror themed animatronic project inspired by the 1979 film "Alien". Our team aims to recreate the famous "Chestburster" scene with our own creative spin.

Tutorial

FAQ

Q: How does the alien come up and down?
A: The Alien is attached to a taut spring and the mechanism that prevents it from popping up is a wooden slab that lays on top of the alien. To activate the motion, the slab will rotate and the spring will allow the alien to pop up. When the motion is over, there will be a ratchet winch system that will pull the alien down using a string connected to it. The wooden slab will rotate over the horizontal alien body and prevent it from popping up when the winch motor stops.

Q: Why did you choose Arduino instead of Raspberry pi?
A: At first, we thought we wanted to use Raspberry pi because it was python based and that's the only programming language we all knew. We found out that it was actually different from the python we learned and that it would be a better idea to learn a different language. It was better to get out of our comfort zones.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

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

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