Animatronics

The animatronic skeleton I built for last Halloween worked, but only after a last-minute compromise: there wasn't enough memory to hold the animation sequences for both the songs and the patter, so I loaded the patter and left it at that. This year the skeleton is going to sing, which means loading the animation files on demand instead of all at once.

I also want to spend less of the night running sequences by hand, so there will be a jukebox mode that lets it perform without intervention. Last year's code is up on GitHub, and the first job is reworking that repo to clean it up and strip out the options I never ended up using.

It’s coming up on October 31st again which means it’s time for our household to start building out our Halloween decorations. We enjoy Halloween in our neighborhood. There’s quite a few kids on our street and we get into the spirit.

My wife and I went with a Mystery Science Theater 3000 theme for the whole house this year, which finally gave me an excuse to build the Tom Servo kit I have wanted for ages. A puppet alone was not quite enough, though, so I set out to make him self-contained: battery powered, one button, a random clip from a pile of prerecorded Servo lines.

What follows is the build. An Arduino Pro Mini left over from last year's eyeball pumpkins, a DFPlayer Mini for audio, servos, speakers, and the awful popping sound that turned out to be the DFPlayer quietly insisting on a steady 3.3V. Code is up on GitHub.

Being new to the neighborhood, we wanted to do something fun, so we took a two pronged approach: a batch of eyeball animatronic pumpkins and a custom window animation. The pumpkins run on cheap servos and Arduinos, built off the usual tutorials, though every one of those assumes the Arduino can power the servos on its own. That works for a few and falls apart around eight, so I ended up with an external supply and a separate power rail for the eyeballs.

The window was the more fun half. My wife handled the design and all the skilled drawing, and I took it into After Effects for the animation loop. I love the way it looked.