Group 068-05: Animatronic Puppets

        This week was our final presentations and showing off our prototype designed through the ten weeks. In the video below you will see how Ethan walks up to the IR sensor to activate the design. Once the IR sensor activated, multiple things are initiated: the motors start to spin pushing the face forward and opening and closing the jaw, the TV light turns on (hard to see in the video due to lighting), and the sound plays.         We completed our goal but would change some things going forward. One major thing is we would get a faster and more powerful motor to propel the face. We would also go about changing the size and shape of the face to make it more visible as well as changing the elastic material to show more detail.

        Over the past few weeks the group has been mostly split between people working on the coding to work with the electronics, and the others building the framework and the parts that will move. This week the project seemed to really be coming together, the electronics and the framework was being put together.         After stressful weeks of spending hours on coding, we finally got the motors to run with the IR sensor to get the whole system to be initiated when people walk in front of it. With the IR sensor working and the motor working, we started on the peripherals: lights and sound. The light was up and running quickly, the sound will hopefully be working by next week. The final circuitry and code is shown below. This ended up taking much longer than we had anticipated.      Now that the face was finished being glued and dried, we put it on the support system to finish all the parts on the linear actuator. Once that was s...