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.

15 thoughts on “Making Your Anime Papercraft Move To The Music

  1. For the Leekspin it doesn’t seem to do a lot of spinning.
    The idea is cool but the final version really should have a continious rotation mod on the servo controlling the arm.
    I also would put that at the front so things don’t get in the way.

    1. The non-continuous-rotation was desired because it mimics the online video exactly. Doing something else would be like rick rolling somebody with a different song. It just wouldn’t be the same ^_-

      1. I realize that I am coming perilously close to getting into an argument with somebody on the Internet, but I think someone crossed the memes. It is my understanding that the original Leekspin (which I believe is what is playing at http://www.leekspin.com/ ) featured Orihime Inoue from Bleach. However, someone has apparently created a Vocaloid version starring Hatsune Miku, as linked to by [Mikey] in an earlier thread. The papercraft version here appears to be a (very good, IMHO) replica of the Miku version.

        (My YouTube search results suggest that there have been renditions starring other anime characters as well, but I can only listen to that polka for so long and thus cannot confirm this…)

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