Embedded Systems and MicroPs in Halloween Animatrons
Around this time of year, Halloween decorations are unavoidable. If you have ever gone trick-or-treating or gone to a Spirit Halloween, you might have been startled by one of those scary animatron.
This Halloween, I’ve engaged with these decorations differently – and admire the embedded systems that allow these guys to run. To understand these systems better, I have looked at some dissassembly videos, and see that most of these systems have a relatively simple core and intricate housings. For example, motors, LED lights, and sound modules connect to a central controller to produce a jarring effect.
Now that I have some experience designing embedded systems, I can imagine how I can use my electronics tool box to create my own animatron. For my blog I opted to do a brainstorming exercise of how I would design a halloween animatron with the MCU and FPGA.
One animatron I saw this season was of a witch that would stir a cauldron and laugh when motion was detected.
This design would require a motion sensor, motor, speaker, and controller. If I were to design this, I would treat the motion sensor as a trigger that would envoke a series of motor and speaker operations. I would use an FSM to wait until motion was detected by waiting for an voltage input connected to a motion sensor like this one was high.
I think my FSM would look something like this:
What I am amazed by is the simplicity of a system that can be so effective, going to show that usually not the difficulty of a project that makes a project effective, but the idea.
Sources:
Here are the youtube videos of the dissassemblies that I watched.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-kKYJtPMec https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t6dM9zDjjXo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ccejC5heTpA