Arvid

Arvid was my first real animatronics project. I was in a class called "model building for special effects" at the Academy of Art in 1997. In that class, we had a whole-semester project where our teacher would guide us through the process of building fantastic landscapes, vehicular or building models, or whatever we wanted to build. I asked if he was OK with me building an animatronic and he said yes. I learned quite a lot of things that semester and ended up with Arvid, which was an animatronic alien head.

After the semester was over, I had a working animatronic but no way to control it so I set out to write some software that could do the trick. I ended writing some software called Servo Animator, which could control eight servos simultaneously in sync with stereo audio.

You can find more information about Arvid at: http://www.buffingtonfx.com/j1432/animatronics/arvid.html