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  • Author Author: easyejl
  • Date Created: Date Created
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Hey Moogle - an animatronic moose assistant

easyejl

My wife and I went to see Evil Dead - The Musical, and I was entranced by the moose puppet on the wall. I thought "Heck, it would be easy enough to make an animatronics moose to have at home", so I set out on this project.

 

 

Basic plan steps are

  • Acquire moose head puppet
  • Acquire robotic arm + servos
  • Begin programming pi - Basically can use most of the Google AYO voice pieces, need to add some references to pulse audio to capture the sound as he's speaking, to use to move the mouth
  • Assemble pieces
  • Laugh a lot

 

Steps completed

Moose head puppet on the way from ebay!

image

Robotic arm on order

Google AYO kit reformatted back to original and programming has begun!

  • That's funny, I tend to have issues with every language except C. I guess it is what you are most familiar with.

     

    Dubbie

  • After a lot of pain and suffering image I finally got the hotword based google assistant working with a VU meter. the problem I had was mostly configuration I think. I started with one meter, but it was python 2.7 based so how it used alsa + pulseaudio was different. then I ran into google assistant problems, then tried another and another and another VU meter type project. Finally found this one. Its in C, but since its real value is that its a) working! and b) shows the pulse audio api calls that get made, I'm pretty sure I can take what I need from it and do it in python. I may just distill it down and use C. I'm just a good bit more comfortable with basically any language other than C image I tend to have memory management issues in C

     

    image

  • the arm is almost complete. I had originally going to use the google AYO voice hardware, but was having problems getting it to specifically work with pulseaudio, which I need for reading the output volume/frequency realtime. so I picked up a different audio card. Nice thing about this specific kit is that the controller built in that you can see in the picture allows control by USB. so easy to integrate with the pi, and I don't need a 2nd servo hat on top of the audio.

    image

  • OK the moose is here and yes Dubbie it was hard to find a life size one.

     

    I've also got the new Google assistant set up on the pi on the old AYO voice kit.

     

    Tomorrow I start to fiddle around with the servo controller and pulse audio callback to see if I can get the servo to move with the speaking