Monday, October 3, 2016

Trashcan Monster, Part 1

For Halloween 2016 I'm going to try to build a "trashcan monster" shock prop, using a metal trash can from Home Depot.

After getting tired of hooking up a laptop to my Jack in the Box prop to tweak settings, I decided to see what I could do with a small backlit 16x2 display and a pushbutton menu design.  Anything that needs to be adjustable could be done through this interface, simplifying things.

And I am going 1/4" on all air components to increase the flow rate so the prop can open and close really fast.

Here's the initial pneumatic linkage design:


























The Arduino code can be found here and I've uploaded a video showing how the menu navigation works.

Here are some photos of the completed linkage:

Linkage1 Linkage2

And here's the mask frame where the speaker is, and after the mask is placed over the frame:

TCM Mask Support TCM Mask with gauze

A quick test of the pneumatics using 1/4" tubing in this video seemed too slow for a shock prop. I'm going to upgrade all the tubing and fittings to 1/2" and see how that performs.

Continue to Trashcan Monster, Part 2

No comments:

Post a Comment