I hate to be the one to naysay, but there wasn’t anything that required an MCU in that skeleton. A spinny motor and a cam would have done all of that, just like the store bought animated stuff.

Posted at 7:44 am on Nov 3rd, 2008 by Perry

At the moment, the Props 8 cores (cogs) is over kill. My understanding is he ran into the deadline and planned to do more with it.

Posted at 8:13 am on Nov 3rd, 2008 by jastreich

not just a couple USB Propellerboards, but also also $250.00 cold, hard cash from Parallax. :)

Posted at 1:49 pm on Nov 3rd, 2008 by Jeff Ledger

perry, That is somewhat true, but we only had 2 weeks. All the propeller is doing in this case is driving the servo. But the nice thing about using the propeller is that I can keep half a dozen of the propeller boards on hand and slap them into
use quickly for a project. Most of the software is in available as “canned routines” and I can just select the ones I need, add a few components, and go. Next thing I want to add is a scanning range finder, so that the skull can be positioned to look back and forth between the two roe three closest bodies. I then want to add code to trigger on specific frequencies. The jaw does this with a black box at the moment, but I am not happy with the volcal triggering. So, I plan to allocate a cog and some additional hardware to trigger the jaw motor. Then I can allocate a third cog to listen for a different frequency and cause the hand to strum the guitar. A fourth cog and listen for the base beat and tap a foot. I have coded for PICs and AVRs and BS2 and others. For me, the spin/propeller combination just work out better for the things I like to do.

Posted at 4:49 pm on Nov 3rd, 2008 by Chuck Rice

Perry, I agree.
I was hoping for something a bit more inspired.

Chuck rice, I would like th see the finished version of this.

to be harsh, you get much better effects yanking on fishing wire.

Posted at 8:34 pm on Nov 3rd, 2008 by mem.namefix

mem.namefix, you may be right. It was just a hack. Maybe not hack-a-day quality. I did not even know it was going to be submitted to Hack-a-Day.

I would like to see the fishing line solutions. Can you send me some good examples?

The problem with building animatronics is that they have to work 8 hours a day, 7 days a week, for the month of October, year after year. The fishing line solutions have to be repaired daily.

Skelly was designed to run during parties and works unattended to whatever music you play, all night long.

This is my second try. The first was here: http://www.wildrice.com/Halloween/Construction/Skeleton/ which I did years ago. The problem there was that the servos kept stripping the gears (even metal gears). And that skeleton was very light weight (it weighed less than a pound) where the one I used this year is over 20 pounds.

It is not as easy as it looks.

Posted at 5:19 am on Nov 4th, 2008 by Chuck Rice