I'm just starting an Animatronic project the hard way. This needs to be an all electric animal, and I was wondering if there are any good books, or sources of info. Extensive 'net searches and book sites like Amazon havn't really turned up much useful stuff.
This is a topic I am very interested in myself. If you have the bucks I'd suggest the Robix robot kit. It is a an extremely powerful and flexible Java programmable servo interface that can control tons of servos at once. In addition, the vendor adopted a client/server methodology so you can have multiple computers working together to control your Animatronic device. This is cool if you want one person controlling the eyes, another controlling the legs, etc. The programming interface is really well done and should give you the tools you need to do the advance level of synchronized movement you need for an Animatronic device, with a minimum of fuss.
I have one of their kits myself and I love it. One of my background projects is interfacing my P5 Virtual Reality glove with the Robix USBOR controller to control an Animatronic device (or one portion of it).
Here is a link to their web site:
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As far as Animatronic specific web sites or documentation, I haven't found much either, so I guess we'll have to build it ourselves. I have opened up a topic section on my forum to discuss Animatronic device development specifically. Please join in:
A good looking animatronic is not an easy hobby project, so I suspect that there may never be much available. However, among the halloween haunted house hobbiest is a large group of people who write up nice how-to pages. That might be a better search to do.
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