How To Animatronics! ~ Part 1: Skeletons and Control Box

hello everybody I'm cat from cats Missouri in front of the camera for the very first time and I'm super excited to be here as you guys know I really enjoy creating animatronics I love working on them and these videos I'll be sharing with you guys some of the magic that goes into making them this guys you might recognize as captain from our animatronic pirate scene and today we'll be taking a look at some of his electronics so what makes him move and I'll be sharing with you guys what's inside my very magical control box right here and I'll be going over all the programming in the next video so if you guys are interested in that consider subscribing that way you'll miss any of my new videos and it's a great way to support me in what I do and I really appreciate it but enough about that let's spin this dude around focused perfect there we are in the animatronic part see there are four different characters Captain blue and brown all have the exact same shoulder mechanism that controls their head movements and Jones can only move his mouth now I can't take credit for this design I saw it in a video back in 2015 when I made these guys and unfortunately I can no longer find that video nor do I really remember much about it so sorry about that but kudos to whoever designed it cuz it's really good you can't get as much movement out of it as you could with something like a triaxial skull so these guys can't look left or right but I think their movements are pretty natural they are very spooky especially considering how simple and easy and cheap this is to make and unlike a triaxial skull you won't have to do any really construction inside the head unless you need to add a universal joint right here which I'll talk more about this joint later and of course you'll need to fit the servo for the jaw inside the head but that's really simple you just cut a little little rectangle out of the mouth there and just populous narrowing and of course if you haven't figured it out by now when both horns are down he's looking up when both horns are up he's looking down he can tilts by doing one horn up when horn down or knee until the other way and these two servos right here are high-tech servos there are HS 4 to 5 B B's they are stand analog servos and I love them these two servos right here have been doing their job on the back of the skeleton for the past five years and we have never had a problem so they were amazing they are very strong very durable very reliable I also use bees in the neck of the original Corvis where they were put under a lot of strain and they performed very well so I highly recommend these for all of your animatronic needs I know I use them a lot and of course we attach the horn to the back of the skull there using these little specialty parts these are from remote control airplanes so you can buy them wherever you can buy parts for that so like hobby shops and this right here I believe is just piano wire you can get it I think from the specialty door at Home Depot or Lowe's or any really rigid wire will do and let's talk about that joint right there I love these plastic skeletons you can get from Michaels Joanne's fabrics party city anywhere really they're pretty good price and the nice thing about them I believe they've changed trying to make them no I think you could still do this mechanism they use this you can see it there they use this string to hang them up in the store don't cut this off when you first get them tie a knot right where it meets the skull there make sure it's tight and then pop the skull up off of the neck and then the head will fall around there's like a little round piece of plastic at the top of the neck there and the head will loosely fall around it like a universal joint so you've already got a built-in universal joint right there how nice is that you don't even have to like install anything there and I forgot to mention earlier there are two screws here when you first get this built in you'll want to undo these before you pop the head off of course and then take the string and you'll just want to tape it to the back of the head that way you won't see it from the front and it's always here if you need to retie the knot which I've had to do over the years and last but not least let's take a look at that jaw mechanism all for pirate characters have a micro servo in the bottom of their skull that controls their jaw and like I said cut a hole in the skull pop the servo in and screw it in place then we just use this fancy little swivel rod here to connect the horn to the jaw it's another RC airplane part but you could probably get away with using a paperclip here if you really wanted but let me talk about the servos themselves in Captain Dan Brown and I believe in Jones we use an HS 65 mg it's another high-tech servo this one actually is metal gear it might be overkill for the jaw really it's very strong but you just really want something that's fast and responsive I believe this one is a bit more on the expensive side you could probably get away with something long cheaper but don't go for the cheapest option originally all of the Pirates have an HS 55 and their jaws I didn't like that servo it was very loud grindy slow we ended up switching out all but one of the privates jaws to the 65 mg just because the other ones were breaking but blue still has is HS 55 in him just because it's never broken yet and I just haven't really gotten around to switching it out I also don't think I have an extra one of these right now but I'll let you see the difference in these clips as you probably noticed the HS 55 you know it's loud it's grimy um it'll do if you have to use it but I recommend something a little nicer maybe not the 65 mg but something in between so that's it three servers per pirate it's very simple should get a lot of movement out of it I like it I might add more of course you know arms movement we'll have fun stuff in the future I've got bigger projects to be working on right now but that's great no you know we put servos and a pirate but well I see not doing anything I want to start moving now well patience young Padawans we still got to plug them all in this is a cat six boosted receiving board include a link in the description to buy them and you'll want to get a sending board to go with it as well these boards are nice because instead of plugging your servos directly into your controller board you can lengthen the distance between your controller board and the servos and use an Ethernet cable to connect them for example the Pirates are all the way in our yard while the computer and the controller board are inside the house where they're safe from moisture which is important because it gets very duty around here in Halloween night and I could be bad for electronics so how do you use it each board can handle for service and each pirate right now only has three service so that means one board pair sending/receiving per pirate plug in new servos yellow wire facing inside and make note of which pin belongs to which servo then just plug in your Ethernet cable and you're good to go we use 50-foot Ethernet cables for the pirates but you of course can use whatever length you need I used this exact same thing porvis sending/receiving board and I just used a 4-foot cable to run between him and that was inside my dress and right now I'm using I think this is a 10 foot cable a normal shirt and yes we use 50 foot cables I don't know if it's just because the steroids aren't under a lot of strain the skull is very light they're not doing a lot of work or if it's the fact that we only have to standard analog servos on one micro servo but I haven't seen any problems on the receiving end the servos have never been jittery and if there is a delay its imperceptible I usually use something this long you'll experience delays and problems like that but I haven't seen any problems yet so I'm keep using it until I do and I know you're all dying to know it's just eating you alive cat what's inside the box well ladies and gentlemen I present to you the great the mighty the one only SSC 32 and like I mentioned earlier we have for sending boards for for pirates but we could actually have four more on this side because as the name implies SSC 32 can handle 32 servos and they're all hooked up to the SSC 32 using these servo cables the first sending board here is wired to the first 4 pins of the sse 32 and of course the second board is wired to the next 4 pins so if the jaw on captain is connected to the first pin on the receiving board and he's plugged into here with the first sending board it'll be hooked up to pin 0 on the SSC 32 and the next pirates job if it's also hooked up to pin 1 on his receiving board it'll actually translate to pin 4 on the SSC 32 because his sending board is hooked up to the next 4 pins and the SSC 32 and yeah that can be a little confusing but he'll get used to it and here we just hook it up to a 6-foot wall adapter to power it [Music] and we're actually using an old board now they're making something called the SSC 32 you everything's still the same in terms of size and configuration except the old s the c32 uses a db9 cable to hook it up to the computer while the new SSC 32 u uses a microUSB and the U is better about smoothing servo motions handling power fluctuations all that fun stuff I don't even think they sell this old board anymore so go ahead and get the U if you can and you'll notice we use standoffs on all the boards that's just to protect them it also comes in handy when you're working with the receiving boards you'll be unplugging things and plugging them back into law on these guys when you're switching our animatronics so it makes it easier to hold on to them and it just protects them and I use this box for everything it's great it has a lot of uses I need to do is grab a receiving board and an Ethernet cable and then just hook up whatever animatronic to one of these sending boards whether it be all four pirates just one pirate Corvis if I'm not walking around with them if I'm just staying with spot prototyping animatronic piece like an arm or just face or something or even just a couple of bear servos and with the software I use I can use this box to puppeteer things like for video like this I can use it to test the parameters of servos once I finished making an animatronic I can use it to test servos when they first come in the mail and most importantly I can use that box to record and run full shows like the pirates display and that's it for hardware it really is that simple now all you need to do is plug them into your computer and get to programming which of course I'll be covering how to do all of that in the next video I hope I explained everything well but of course if you have any questions feel free to leave them in the comments or you can always shoot me an email you can find that in the about page my channel and of course thank you so much for watching I really enjoy making these videos and I hope you enjoy them too well captain do you have anything to add before we go what's that you said I should subscribe now I don't miss any of our future uploads wow what a great idea and it looks like my camera's gonna die so goodbye everybody [Music]

Channel: Cat's Menagerie

Views: 85,810

Keywords: animatronic, how to, diy, tutorial, skull, talking, head, moving, robotic, halloween, decoration, easy, simple, hack, prop, SSC-32, servo, board, SSC-32U, animatronics, howto, pirate, pirates, skeleton

Id: Jk3ZsyrTU4M

Length: 10min 50sec (650 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 25 2019