Much like Frankenstein's monster, pumpkins become more interesting once electricity becomes involved.
My goal for this year's custom Halloween decoration was to create a seemingly normal pumpkin that when prompted will extend its legs and reveal that it is in fact a robot in disguise.
The robot uses 8 servo motors to actuate the legs. In its current version it can only extend and retract its legs to stand itself up and return itself to pumpkin form; in a future update I intend to add four more to give the robot the ability to walk around. Unfortunately, the adhesives used to secure the plastic skeleton to the foam leg pieces created a weaker connection than I anticipated so in the attached media files the pumpkin is propped up on a stand so the legs aren't supporting the body. Although the servos are powerful enough to stand the robot up the leg pieces would likely need additional support to endure the shear forces at the interface.
An Arduino Nano receives input from a potentiometer and outputs a signal to the servo driver. Due to the asymmetric nature of the pumpkin each servo has a unique set of angle values associated with a fully contracted and fully expanded state. These values are used with the mapping function so, as the potentiometer is rotated, each of the legs ranges from fully contracted to fully standing while constraining the motion to their predetermined range.
Comments