The Animatronic Menagerie

After finishing the blinking mechanism, and realizing how alive Samuel suddenly felt, it was obvious that the next thing to implement would be the ability for Samuel to make sounds – to “speak”.

In the previous post, I showed how I installed a speaker inside the skull of Samuel, my animatronic raven, and wired it through an amplifier to play realistic raven sounds.

Getting my raven animatronic to speak convincingly presented an interesting challenge: translating audio into natural beak movements – Samuel beak movements must sync perfectly with his vocalizations.

When I started this project I didn’t think about documenting it.

At this point, the project has reached another stage where a crucial decision needed to be made.

In my last blog post, I discussed building the initial functioning skeleton for my animatronic raven project.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been captivated by the idea of bringing inanimate objects to life through the magic of animatronics.