Super-sized Animatronic Ball Ornaments

• Supersized Animatronic Christmas Ball Ornament - Watch The Video! Click HERE - from Tory Street Lights

What is it? These are lip-syncing ornaments. The ornament is handmade polyester resin over fiberglass and cheesecloth with animatronic eyes, eyelids, eyebrows and mouth.

How did it go over? Maybe you want to make a splash in your display? Terry said, "With the benefit of hindsight that was money well spent, judging from the comments that I hear from the viewing public."

Where did this idea come from? Brian "Lightman" Lincoln did this: Singing Christmas Tree

Terry Sutton (Tory Street Lights aka T.D.Sutton) wanted to supersize the idea for his front porch. He custom designed the ornaments and made them by hand. He thinks it was about a three month journey and they each turned out to be quite expensive (#Cost).

This entry was edited by MikeKrebs but most of it is Terry's words either from the video or from correspondence with him. So, when you read first person comments, you should hear Terry talking and when you read third person comments, that would be Mike putting words to Terry's project. If you make something similar and want to add your comments, please do so!

Features

• Large ornament - about 2 feet across
• Sculpted eye sockets
• Eyes move together for natural look
• Eye moves in two dimensions - up/down and left-right
• Eye movements can be done at same time (roll eyes!)
• Eyebrows are independently controlled
• Ornament turns away from crowd when not doing show
• Controlled via Renard protocol
• Can be controlled by wireless ESP8266 module
• All custom made

Bill of Materials

• Big ball (25 inches)
• PVA glue (Elmers!)
• Paper towels for mache
• Cheesecloth
• Fiberglass and polyester resin
• Bog filler (Bondo type could be used) to form up eye contours
• Planting container

For the record there are eight servos in use in each ornament.

• 1 - Mouth
• 2 - Slow Rotate
• 3 - Eyes Up / Down
• 4 - Eyes Left / Right
• 5 - Left Eyelid
• 6 - Right Eyelid
• 7 - Left Eye Brow
• 8 - Right Eyebrow

The individual control of the eyelids was so that I could make them wink, while the separate eyebrows were also for expression / effect.

• There is also a motor that turns the whole assembly.

• brass rods
• wire rods
• bicycle spokes
• foam board
• board board

• Renard board
• Renard servo software
• Opto-couplers
• Drivers

• 1000 watt slide projector with template

• Chris Maloney's Audacity converter.

• Many cans of paint.

Eye Mechanism

The inspiration was Marshall Tearle's Eyes. If you look his over, you will see how Tory Street Light's came together.

Setting up the eye mechanism required an inordinate amount of time. Placing the eyeball mounting rod with the universal joint exactly in the geometric center of the ball required a center mark to be made on the outside of the ball with a black marker pen while the ball half was spun up in my metal lathe to locate the eye center. A 1/8 inch brass rod, with a washer soldered on the end, roughly shaped to a convex curve to match the internal surface of the ball, was then "5 minute Epoxied" into the ball. The rod was located over the ball's center mark, while being held at the outside end by the centering plate. The brass rod was then cut to length once the Epoxy had cured.

This was centering was most important, as the eyeball had to be concentric with the eyelids to allow them to open and close with the eyeballs in any position, but not touch one another. The clearances involved in this project were very fine and created problems when I glued the photograph of the eye in position. Many hours of adjustment was required to get everything operating and in the correct place.

The pictures of real eyes, obtained from the internet, were adjusted to the required size and then printed as photographs in a local photo lab. They were cut to shape and then had three radial cuts made in to the black iris. To make them to conform to the eye's spherical form they were soaked in Methylated spirits (denatured alcohol), then pressed between waste disk sections removed from the rear of the eyeball when it was opened up for mounting and control.

The eye mechanism in the photographs is a spare set, and as such has micro servos to operate the eyelids, the display ornaments have digital servos in that position that are three or four times faster. These were necessary because human eyelids "Blink" very quickly, to replicate this, super fast servos were required.

Ornament Mounting

Each "Ball" is supported on a 3/8 inch threaded rod running through ball races mounted under the two marine ply plates that are fiber-glassed inside the ball. The weight is taken on nuts threaded on the rod with two nuts locked together at the bottom, and another pair under, and on top of, the top bearing. At the bottom, inside the ball, an arm is lock-nutted to the rod, which is connected to an arm on a jumbo servo to allow slow controlled rotation of the ball, over about 60 degrees, so that they can "look" at each other.

The top end of the rod has a purpose made threaded female adapter screwed on and lock-nutted to it that converts from 3/8 inch to 6.0 mm. The 6.0 mm socket end has a 6.00 mm threaded "Rawl Anchor" hook that is made for concrete "Rawl Anchor" attachments. These were used because I did not trust my welding should I welded the two rods together.

The hook is simply hooked over a bolt running through two plates that are bolted through another eye-bolt in the same plates, this eye-bolt is attached to the 180 degree rotating mechanism in a similar way to the ball's hook. This setup is visible in the picture under the rotating mechanism. Once the ball is hooked onto its cross bolt, the bolts are tightened up very tight, because all the rotating forces are transferred through the fixture. The hook makes for "easy" mounting and demounting of the Ball.

Ornament Rotation

The rotating mechanism may require some further explanation, it is based on a 24 volt gearbox out of a soft drink dispenser, or similar. It has another three times reduction to it's output shaft using some discarded heavy duty gears from my work at the time. The 3/8 inch threaded output shaft is once more supported on ball races top and bottom, lock nutted as required. The large output gear has bolts on it to operate the Micro switch end-stops. Electrically the mechanism has 12 volts DC supplied permanently, and is controlled by a signal from one of the display Renard controller channels. When the channel is "Off" the ball is "Parked", when the channel is "On" the ball rotates 180 degrees and faces the street, then returns to parked again when the channel is switched "Off".

Here you can see the gears including the limit switches and the stop bolt that provide the stop position for "Off" and "On".

The Rotating mechanism is mounted on a discarded satellite dish mounting arm, locked up good and tight at right angles. The arm is attached to a wooden plate that is "F" cramped to a verandah rafter when on display. This plate has hooks to slip under the iron roof for added support. The result being the balls are kept out of the weather for protection, and out of sight when not "Performing".

Renard controller

Another item that may require further explanation is the Renard controller. This is housed in a re-purposed electric drill case, with the electronics separated inside plastic sandwich boxes for safety. The controller is a strip-board 32 channel Renard controller, using regular PIC16F688 chips, loaded with Chris Maloney's Ren Servo software, running at 11500 baud. There are 32 Channels because it was initially intended to have four "Ornaments". The controller is capable of running from the ESP8266 Pixelstick in the lower lefthand corner of the picture, but I prefer it to be cabled from the end of a 448 Channel controller chain. The Renard controller talks to the opto-couplers via the cable bundles on the right side of the case.

The Renservo software came from Dirk’s Wiki, originally written by Chris Maloney "Ctmal" on the forum and updated by “GDYRDAVE”, who passed away a couple of years ago. :-(

Firmware_-_multiple_versions

I used the Pic16F688 version which worked fine for me. I tried the PIC 16F1825 version, this worked fine but inverted the data/servo positions and as such I didn’t have the time to correct all the data so I returned to the PIC16F688.

Opto-coupler and buffer box

The Opto-coupler and buffer box also has 32 channels available. The opto-couplers are wired to the buffer chips that send the signals to the servos and relays. The buffer/driver chips are hidden under the linking cables on the right hand side of the picture. It was fortuitous that the buffer chips have a tri-state gating pin. I was able to take advantage of this to disable the data to the Ornaments when they were not "Performing". This was necessary because the Renard chain was outputting pulse width data outside the range of the servos when not "performing", the effect was that all the servos went to random positions way outside their expected positions. The gating signal was gained by using the projector control signal from a Renard controller channel, applied through an opto-coupler. The gating to "On" occurs 100 milliseconds after the start of the sequence, and "Off" occurs 60 milliseconds before the end of the sequence.

Cost

The whole project took around three months or so, full time. Thankfully I am retired; so time is not too much of a problem. I did not have a budget for the project. It just had a life of its own, and as it transpired, it was a good thing I didn’t. Only when the project was completed I managed to locate all the invoices / till dockets and totaled them up. It was a good thing I was sitting down when I saw the bottom line!! They cost around $600.00 (US) each, way above my guestimation!! With the benefit of hindsight that was money well spent, judging from the comments that I hear from the viewing public.

The most expensive items would be the Fiberglass Dynal Cloth, Polyester Resin and the thinners. Then the Rustoleum Glitter spray-can paint, these were about $20.00 (US) per can and I used around 10 per Ornament. Also about 8 or 10 Cans of clear sealing spray, thankfully slightly cheaper than the Glitter paint! Next in line would be the several pounds of Polyester builders / car body filler or “Bog” that was required to form/create the eyebrows and eye sockets. The next most expensive would be the big Jumbo servos, they were around the $30.00 – $40.00 each, two per ornament, plus spares, as well as the very fast eyelid servo’s they were in the region of $15.00 each with two per Ornament, plus spares.

It was fortuitous that I was able to acquire from my employer, prior to retirement, discarded, out of spec, Ball races, big gears, micro switches and the industrial plastic parts that I used to create the eye mechanism. The ball races, (8 per ornament) and the mounting plates that support the ornaments are included in the above!