Animatronics

Current projects

Animatronic egg

This is something I’ve been working on for a while- the Elemental Egg from Hellboy: The Golden Army. This is an extremely complicated piece with LOTS of small parts. There are over 60 gears to make as well as lots of tiny linkages. The vast majority of parts are made from brass and there are definitely going to be a few challenges in getting a precise fit to the shell parts. I have also drawn up a design to make the egg entirely mechanical vs having it powered by servos- but the mechanical egg will have to wait for later.

New linear servo design– this is based around two small linear servos. I ended up liking this version much better than the previous design as the base will be much lower in height (about 50mm) and the drive mechanism is much simpler.

Original vertical servo driven design– this was based around standard size servos and a small diameter round base. Ultimately I didn’t like the look of the tall, narrow mechanism of this design.

Animatronic Stargate staff weapon

This is based on castings from molds made from original film production pieces. The staff opening mechanism is based on the mechanics of the film staff. The original film staff weapons were pneumatic but this one is to be electronic using a linear servo to drive the mechanism and it will have additional lights and sound effect.

Animatronic cosplay wings

An incredibly difficult project. The wings were to weigh about 1.75 lbs each and be about 39″ in length. All four wings needed to raise up together and then the inner wings needed to be able to lower and then raise back up along with additional forward/back flapping motion. This was accomplished using a two stage custom built linear drive arrangement with very tight packaging- the mechanism is about 8.5″ wide and 10″ long. All wings were driven using small diameter braided stainless cables. This mechanism was really just too complex and had LOTS of problems.

This is currently being rebuilt to be much smaller/lighter and with lower power requirements. The new mechanics are being build around servo driven lead screw drives. This uses an eight turn winch servo to get 64mm of lead screw travel. The benefit is that it is much smaller, lighter, lower power and doesn’t require a separate motor driver circuit with position feedback.

Previous two stage linear cable drive setup-

 

Finished projects

Animatronic four wing mechanism

This was a tricky job to figure out as I had to build a really compact mechanism that could move four separate wings in an upward/folding motion. The trick was making it work using a single servo. The mechanism is small enough to fit in my outstretched hand- the backplate measures about 7″ across. The wings are polycarbonate and span is about 62″. Overall I’m pretty happy with how compact it is and that I can get this range of motion using a single servo.

There’s a full tutorial on Instructables.

Pretty neat being able to move four wings this size with a single servo on just 4.8V (it’ll be much faster on 7.2V )

Test video with wings mounted-

Close up video of the mechanism working-

Stargate Horus helmet

This build was a special project I did for a friend. I didn’t make the helmet castings- I just made it move. I will say that the helmet that was sent to me is one of the most gorgeous movie prop replicas I’ve ever seen- the first photo shows a painted mock up helmet. It’s an absolutely stunning piece and it’s dead on accurate (the fiberglass castings were made from an original film helmet.) Although it is a display piece it is wearable just like the movie helmets.

The helmet has moving head, light up eyes (dimmable), opening eye iris and properly moving fans. Everything is radio control just like the original movie helmets (the eye dimming is controlled by an Arduino tied into the radio receiver.) This was a really exciting project and I’m thrilled to have had the opportunity to work on it.

Full build on Instructables and Hackaday.

View as a .pdf file here- Stargate-Helmet-Animatronics

Animatronic Predator cannons

I’ve built animatronics for several Predator cannons. The big AVP cannon seen here was for a friend that wanted to animate a display piece for his son. When a person walks by the ultrasonic sensor triggers the motion- the cannon raises, powers up, laser sight turns on, cannon fires several times (with recoil action) and then lowers back down and powers down.

The P1 cannon mechanism was built for the Monsterpalooza Jamie Hall suit up/tribute with the original Stan Winston Studios film crew. This cannon was a push button rig that ran through a pre programmed motion sequence.

The last video shows the first cannon mechanism I built back in 2008. It was an accelerometer based head tracking system. Ideally I would have preferred to use a dual IMU (inertial measurement unit) setup but IMU’s at the time were still fairly large (and expensive!)

AVP cannon build on Hackaday.

Monsterpalooza P1 build on Instructables. View as a .pdf file here- Building-a-killer-Predator-costume

Head tracking cannon on Instructables.

Iron Man Mk III suit

This was a big project! My friend Greg from the Replica Prop Forum wanted to add animatronics to his Iron Man MkIII fiberglass suit so we went all out. After considering several options I built an Arduino based system using RFID tags in the gloves to trigger the shoulder rocket pods, hip pods, forearm missile, back flaps and helmet. The helmet has wireless control via XBee radios. The boots light up and make sound while walking by using a PIR sensor in the boot to trigger the effect.

This was built in 2013 and of course knowing what I now know I’d do things quite a bit different- the technology has changed drastically since then. As far as I’m aware this was the very first full animatronic fan made Iron Man suit.

There is a complete build tutorial on Instructables and Hackaday.

View as a .pdf file here- Animatronic-Iron-Man-Mk-III-suit

Iron Man MkIV helmet

A project for my friend Thomas of Hollywood Hardware. He wanted to animate his MkIV display helmet using push button control with a specific movement/light sequence.

Animatronics controller board

I made a neat little wireless animatronics/servo controller board using an Arduino Pro Mini with a socketed XBee radio in a custom PCB. This was designed to accept multiple sensor inputs to be used as function triggers/control inputs. This also works really well as a sensor node for wireless data acquisition (with 3.3V based sensors.) If I was to redesign this I would probably use an ARM Cortex M4 based board for the additional processing power/data throughput as the low voltage Pro Mini cannot handle multiple sensors at high frequencies.

Full write up with lots of code examples on Instructables.

View as a .pdf file here- Arduino-animatronics-make-your-awesome-costumes-m

Air muscles

Air muscles are very powerful actuators that work very similar to a human muscle and have a phenomenal strength to weight ratio- they can exert a pulling force up to 400 times their own weight. They will work when twisted or bent and can work under water. They’re also easy and cheap to make!

Tutorial on Instructables.

View as a .pdf file here- How-to-make-air-muscles

Ben Krasnow of Applied Science (a fantastic YouTube channel) made a cool force feedback joystick using the info in the instructable. Neat!