Pi

(Late Summer 2019) I wrote previously about my successful animatronic eyes build using some ping pong balls as ’eyes’, which moved around on a rig, each powered by 2 servos, for 2 axes of movement and controlled by an Adafruit Crickit and the Circuit Playground Express [CPE]. It worked well enough and the effect was quite interesting, but for what I wanted - eyes moving in a hood as party of a creepy monster animatronic for Hallowe’en - there were a few drawbacks. I could put the Cricket/CPE behind the eyes and use the onboard LEDs to shine a creepy red light behind them which looked good, but it was difficult to see them under most hood ideas. Also, I could program the ’eyes’ to move in a nice creepy way, but the servo noise was a bit distracting. ...

I seem to be running out of Raspberry Pis compared to the number of small projects I’m using them in. As it is, my Pi3 is torn between Kodi/LibreELEC and some animatronic duty and the Pi2 is being used in my wi-fi car which is currently a live project. That’s why at some point I need to buy a Pi4! I also wanted to bring back my Pi-Hole, which used to be on the Pi2. What to do? Well what I’ve done is re-install Raspberry Pi OS Lite and then Pi-Hole on my ancient Pi 1B, and so far it seems to be working fine, no heating or load issues as far as I can tell, so it feels good to get some more functionality out of that. ...

(Summer 2019) For a while I’ve wanted to do a simple animatronic for Halloween. Each year we do a simple setup outside our house for the neighbourhood kids, and each year we try to add to it, usually with some better items we pick up over the year, but I wanted to start adding some home made items, in that spirit of home-made Halloween fare. A couple of years ago I did a head prop I made from a 100yen polystyrene wig stand, first as a ‘grey’ alien head, then I got some latex and a craft knife and made something a little more gory. I quite enjoyed making it and looking at the response it got from both kids and adults, they seemed to be intrigued too. ...