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  • Author Author: easyejl
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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!

  • we have mouth movement

     

  • Luckily both my daughters and mother in law are into sewing, so there was a seam ripper tool in the house. It was pretty easy to cleanly remove the thread holding the blue part to the fur, and empty him. I see now that a lot of the weight comes from the metal bar holding the horns up, which is fine at least for now (until i decide to animate them too image) as that can get mounted partially to the board he's going to go on

    image

  • Today's work is de-stuffing moogle, and then rebuilding some sort of skeleton inside. Right now, the stuffing is so full and stiff there is no way the arm can possibly move his face independently of his neck. plus he's really heavy, and its all stuffing weight

    imageimage

  • I've decided that regardless of my sound related issues, this weekend i'm removing the fluff from the moose head, and working out the supports internally. It's kind of sad to cut into a $150 puppet, but c'est la vie. I'd rather have the movement + the puppet head worked out and need to add powered speakers + mic than just continue to spin on that detail.

  • Still unable to get the audio to work. I'm stuck with the flip option of abandoning using the audio card, and instead adding a USB mic, and powered speakers to the pi to leave the current config as close as to the way it currently is as possible.

     

    I also may try flipping the stack of 2 hats and the sd card into another pi to see if it somehow could be a board related thing