Making Your Anime Papercraft Move To The Music

This anime character is dancing to the music thanks to some animatronic tricks which [Scott Harden] put together. She dances perfectly, exhibiting different arm and head movements at just the right time. The secret to the synchronization is actually in the right channel of the audio being played.

The character in question is from an Internet meme called the Leekspin song. [Scott] reproduced it on some foam board, adding a servo to one arm to do the leek spinning, and another to move the head. These are both driven by an ATtiny44. All of the movements have been preprogrammed to go along with the audio track. But he needed a way to synchronize the beginning of each action set. The solution was to re-encode the audio with one track devoted to a set of sine wave pulses. The right audio channel feeds to the AVR chip via an LM741 opamp. Each sine wave triggers the AVR to execute the next dance move in the sequence. You can see the demo video for the project after the break.

Continue reading “Making Your Anime Papercraft Move To The Music”

Turning 3D Prints Into Aluminum Castings

[Jeshua] needed a laser head attachment for a 5×10 foot CNC machine he’s working on. Because he has a 3D printer, [Jeshua] could easily print a laser mount and attach it to his CNC gantry, but that wouldn’t look very professional. Instead of decorating his gigantic machine with brightly colored plastic, he decided for a more industrial look by casting a laser head in aluminum using a 3D printed master.

[Jeshua] designed two parts for his laser cutter in OpenSCAD and printed them out on his 3D printer. A few bits of foam insulation were glued on to act as sprues, and an investment mold was made out of 1 part Plaster of Paris and 1 part playground sand.

After the mold had cured, [Jeshua] put is mold in a coffee can furnace to burn out the wax and foam. These hollow molds were placed in sand and the crucible loaded up with aluminum scrap.

The finished laser head fit his CNC machine perfectly – no small feat, considering [Jeshua] needed to take in to account how much the aluminum would contract after cooling. Not bad for one day’s work.