Building an animatronic robot is one thing, but animating it in a lifelike fashion is a completely different challenge. Hobby servos are cheap and popular for animatronics, but just letting it move at max speed isn’t particularly lifelike. In the video after the break, [James Bruton] demonstrates how to achieve natural motion with a simple animatronic head and a few extra lines of code.

Very little natural body movement happens at a constant speed, it’s always accelerating or decelerating. When we move our heads to look at something around us, our neck muscles accelerate our head sharply in the chosen direction and then slows down gradually as it reaches its endpoint. To do this in Arduino/C code, a new intermediate position for the servo is specified for each main loop until it reaches the final position. The intermediate value is the sum of 95% of the current position, and 5% of the target position. This gives the effect of the natural motion described above. The ratios can be changed to suit the desired speed.

The delay function is usually one of the first timing mechanisms that new Arduino programmers learn about, but it’s not suited for this application, especially when you’re controlling multiple servos simultaneously. Instead, the millis function is used to keep track of the system clock in the main loop, which fires the position update commands at the specified intervals. Adafruit wrote an excellent tutorial on this method of multitasking, which [James] based his code on. Of course, this should be old news to anyone who has been doing embedded programming for a while, but it’s an excellent introduction for newcomers.

Like most of [James]’s projects, all the code and CAD files are open source and available on GitHub. His projects make regular appearances here on Hackaday, like his mono-wheel balancing robot and mechanically multiplexed flip-dot display.

[Greg06] started learning electronics the same way most of us did: buy a few kits, read a few tutorials, and try your hardest to put a few things together. Sound familiar? After a while, you noticed your skills started increasing, and your comfort level with different projects improved as well. Eventually, you try your hand at making your own custom projects and publishing your own tutorials.

Few are lucky to have a first-project as elaborate as [Greg06’s] quadruped robot. We don’t know about you, but for some of us, we were satisfied with blinking two LEDs instead of just one.

[Greg06’s] robot has a quadruped based, housed within a 3D printed spherical body. The legs are retractable and are actuated by tiny servo motors inside the body. [Greg06] even included an ultrasonic distance sensor for the obstacle avoidance mechanism. Honestly, if it weren’t for the ultrasonic distance sensor protruding from the spherical body, you might think that the entire robot was just a little Wiffle ball. This reminds us of another design we’ve seen before.

If that weren’t enough, the spherical head can rotate, widening the range of the ultrasonic distance sensor and obstacle avoidance mechanism. This is accomplished by attaching another servo motor to the head.

Pretty neat design if you ask us. Definitely one of the coolest quadrupeds we’ve seen.

In his latest video, Will Cogley has created an animatronic heart so realistic that you might wonder if it’s the actual thing. 

The device is made out of molded silicon with fake blood poured on top to enhance the effect, and inside a trio of servo motors push the lower and upper sections of the prop out in a very lifelike pattern. 

Control is via an Arduino Micro along with an I2C servo controller, while power is provided by an external tether. A potentiometer on the back is used to vary heartbeat speed. 

He also made a simpler — and less potentially terrifying — version with a cloth exterior. This one is battery-operated and runs on a motor and linkage system, perhaps making it good for a nice portable joke!

If you’re a fan of Portal games, you’d probably like nothing more than to have your own Wheatley Personality Core to accompany you on real-life adventures. While that would be a passing thought for most, Luke Albertson has created his own amazing replica of the Portal 2 character. 

The device not only can say over 40 phrases from the game via an Adafruit soundboard, but contains a glowing blue eyeball that can pan, tilt, twist, and blink to help express what it’s thinking. It even has handles that move up and down, adding a kind of “flailing arms” effect to convey its emotions. 

Albertson’s animatronic project is controlled by an Arduino Uno, along with a Bluetooth shield and PS3 controller for user interface. It’s shown off quite nicely in the video below, and more info and clips are available here.

Lip syncing for computer animated characters has long been simplified. You draw a set of lip shapes for vowels and other sounds your character makes and let the computer interpolate how to go from one shape to the next. But with physical, real world puppets, all those movements have to be done manually, frame-by-frame. Or do they?

Stop motion animator and maker/hacker [James Wilkinson] is working on a project involving a real-world furry cat character called Billy Whiskers and decided that Billy’s lips would be moved one frame at a time using servo motors under computer control while [James] moves the rest of the body manually.

He toyed around with a number of approaches for making the lip mechanism before coming up with one that worked the way he wanted. The lips are shaped using guitar wire soldered to other wires going to servos further back in the head. Altogether there are four servos for the lips and one more for the jaw. There isn’t much sideways movement but it does enough and lets the brain fill in the rest.

On the software side, he borrows heavily from the tools used for lip syncing computer-drawn characters. He created virtual versions of the five servo motors in Adobe Animate and manipulates them to define the different lip shapes. Animate then does the interpolation between the different shapes, producing the servo positions needed for each frame. He uses an AS3 script to send those positions off to an Arduino. An Arduino sketch then uses the Firmata library to receive the positions and move the servos. The result is entirely convincing as you can see in the trailer below. We’ve also included a video which summarizes the iterations he went through to get to the finished Billy Whiskers or just check out his detailed website.

[Jame’s] work shows that there many ways to do stop motion animation, perhaps a part of what makes it so much fun. One of those ways is to 3D print a separate object for each character shape. Another is to make paper cutouts and move them around, which is what [Terry Gilliam] did for the Monty Python movies. And then there’s what many of us did when we first got our hands on a camera, move random objects around on our parent’s kitchen table and shoot them one frame at a time.

This concept to make a humanoid head, that speaks like a human, chooses phrases randomly. As (it) speaks , it moves head, eyeballs and eyebrows randomly in an emulation of a human. This can be useful for lonely people who cannot have a pet at home.

This is the basic idea..Later it is possible to develope it further to talk longer durations, and even tell short stories stored on an SD card.

read more

This concept to make a humanoid head, that speaks like a human, chooses phrases randomly. As (it) speaks , it moves head, eyeballs and eyebrows randomly in an emulation of a human. This can be useful for lonely people who cannot have a pet at home.

This is the basic idea..Later it is possible to develope it further to talk longer durations, and even tell short stories stored on an SD card.

read more

I came across this circuit on google. It controls motor speed by simple flip-flop that gives a PWM signal.

The question is can this be used as a servo control ?

first use 5 volts supply instead of 12 volts ...then by replacing the 3RD NPN transistor with a servo. the + goes up, the - goes down and the signal feeds from the flip flop...can we do that ??

I came across this circuit on google. It controls motor speed by simple flip-flop that gives a PWM signal.

The question is can this be used as a servo control ?

first use 5 volts supply instead of 12 volts ...then by replacing the 3RD NPN transistor with a servo. the + goes up, the - goes down and the signal feeds from the flip flop...can we do that ??

Today we want to introduce you to a new Arduino at Heart Partner launching on Kickstarter this week: Hummingbird Duo is an electronics kit designed to be fun and educational for a fourth grader, a high school student, a college engineering student, or an adult maker.

Hummingbird Duo  creates a bridge between making and classroom education combining craft materials, electronic components and drag &drop programming. Part of Hummingbird’s mission is, in fact, to explode common conceptions of how robotics can be used in K-12 education:

 We have designed several levels of learning into the Hummingbird experience. Instead of a steep learning curve, learners go up a staircase where each step increases skills and where mastering each step allows one to use the Hummingbird in a new and more interesting way.

The kit was developed by BirdBrain Technologies, a Pittsburgh, PA firm founded by Tom Lauwers in 2010 to commercialize educational technology developed by the Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute’s CREATE lab and since 2012, they have pledged 1% of their net profits to the Computer Science Teacher’s Association.

Support them on Kickstarter!