Project Overview

Image result for bursting scene from alien

The goal of this project is to recreate the scene from “Alien” where an alien pops out of a human body while taking creative liberty. The inspiration for the project came when the professor mentioned that the theme from the prior year’s class was horror. The plan was to focus on making the alien as detailed as possible with glowing eyes, a swaying body, and having a scream play as it pops out of the human cavity. The Arduino program was required to control motors to accomplish the different movements that the alien will perform. With artistic skills used to make a latex alien skin and programming, the final product is expected to be shocking as the alien suddenly pops out of a human torso with a winch and spring mechanism coupled with glowing eyes and erratic motions.

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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

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

Group 064-03: Recreation of "Alien"

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