Revisited a 27-year-old animatronics project from my prop building days in NYC. I originally built this using an old manakin head I found in a dumpster and a gimmicky singing Christmas tree that had just come to market in 1996. I created a hinged jaw then removed the mechanism from the fake tree and stuffed in inside the head to line up with the eyes and mouth. It worked quite well for a long time and then got "put away" for over two decades until a couple of days ago. I tried firing it up after all those years, but the motors and audio only partially worked. So, I gutted the head by removing the old mechanism (except for the speaker) and installed a 9g micro servo to be run by one of my "jawduino" controllers - with audio from an Echo Dot Alexa device for a quick test. Total project time was 40 minutes. More to come on this... 94,99,71,0,B
4 comments:
Tracy & Woody and who knows how many more… now @ tfl as a hybrid
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5nB2qWJaXSc
https://atlantic.ctvnews.ca/content/dam/ctvnews/en/images/2022/11/19/woody-the-talking-christmas-tree-1-6160598-1668889463662.png
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UzBbt4t0E5o
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talking_tree
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7kHZ0a_6TxY
"Douglas Fir" showing his moves -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=J2U0T-fPfZ0
the Deweys will want one of these next -
your abode is becoming a chatter box
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fkYZ4wTBd8g
It took me awhile to figure out which mechanism I originally used for the project. I knew it was Christmas themed and thought perhaps it was a singing Santa head. After about an hour of internet searches, I finally found it was a tree. Now I vividly remember extracting it from the branches.
Interesting use for Alexa type devices...
Alexa is quite helpful in everyday life - might as well give it a moving mouth.
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