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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.

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Week 10

Plans: Assemble audio, motor, and servos all to one bread board and arduino uno drill holes for audio to play through adjust latex sizing for alien add stopper to alien figure out winch system Results: Assembled all parts to one arduino uno, but had to scrap winch idea The alien will only pop up, but will not go back into the box again

Week 5

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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 mini...