The Head

So, I'm going to start building with the head. This will stick out from my chest, just below my neck. It will have a neck with two axes of movement (up and down and left and right) and an eye stalk sticking out the front with the same two axes of movement, but controlled independently. I'll get on to the method of control later.

The first challenge was to design a structure that could move freely in the two axes required, with that movement being controlled by one motor for each axis. I played around for a while and came up with this:

As you can see, it's made with two Lego NXT motors and a bunch of Lego Technic parts. The part that sticks straight up from the neck will be used to attach a spring betwwen the head and the top motor in order to give the whole head a "neutral" position of looking straight up instead of hanging down. I'm not going to attach that until the very last, though, as I want to calibrate it to the toal weight of the head, which is currently unknown.

Concepts

Warning

If you are going to play, or think you may play the game I am intending to run DO NOT READ THIS BLOG. This will contain spoilers about one of the significant monsters that will appear in the game, and thus could spoil the surprise when it turns up at two in the morning.

Concept work

So this should probably come with another warning - I am really, really not an artist of any shape or form. So what follows is not so much concept drawings as it is concept scribbles.

Anyway:

Edit: Not sure what has happened with the spacing on this post, but so it goes.

The Brief

Warning

If you are going to play, or think you may play the game I am intending to run DO NOT READ THIS BLOG. This will contain spoilers about one of the significant monsters that will appear in the game, and thus could spoil the surprise when it turns up at two in the morning.

The Brief

This monster must fulfil several criteria and constraints:

Criteria 1: It must be scary (duh!)

This is actually a lot harder than it sounds. Not everyone is scared by the same thing, and it is actually very hard to avoid the “it’s just a guy in a suit” effect. So this leads to:

Criteria 2: It must look as little like a guy in a suit as possible.

Another way of freaking people out is by creating a sense of more movement than two arms and two legs can provide. Hopefully you can tickle the “arachnid reaction” and make people’s skin crawl a little.

Criteria 3: It must create a sense of movement outside the normal range of human capability.

More criteria will probably crop up as we go along.

Constraint 1: It must be 100% operable by one person.

We don’t have a team of puppeteers handy to operate this thing. The guy operating it must be able to operate it completely by himself. (To be more precise – I have to be able to operate it by myself).

Constraint 2: It must be able to fit through a normal doorway.

This is a fairly important constraint that puts strict upper limits on the size of the thing.

Constraint 3: Budget is very limited.

I don’t have a great deal of money to play with, so I’m doing this on the cheap. I’m aiming for the Arduino itself to represent a significant portion of the spend on this thing.

Summary:

The Monster must meet the following criteria:

• Criteria 1: It must be scary
• Criteria 2: It must look as little like a guy in a suit as possible.
• Criteria 3: It must create a sense of movement outside the normal range of human capability.

The Monster must fit within the following constraints:

• Constraint 1: It must be 100% operable by one person.
• Constraint 2: It must be able to fit through a normal doorway.
• Constraint 3: Budget is very limited.

Next post, I’ll aim to put up some early design sketches.

Introduction

Warning

If you are going to play, or think you may play the game I am intending to run DO NOT READ THIS BLOG. This will contain spoilers about one of the significant monsters that will appear in the game, and thus could spoil the surprise when it turns up at two in the morning.

Still with me? OK.

I am planning to use Arduino to make a large and scary monster for a Horror Live ActionRoleplay game I will be running in the near(ish) future.

What's Live Action Roleplay? It's what this blog isn't about. Google it if you want to know. All that matters here is the build process.

What's Arduino?

It's an opensource... oh, follow the link and check it out. They can explain better than I can.

I'm doing all my prototyping on a Duemilanove board. If it proves possible, I'll be running the monster on it as well.

From here on, it's on with the show.