Mattel Grogu Animatronic Upgrade

madhephaestus

New Member
I have built an animatronic upgrade kit for the Mattel Grogu.

EDIT, original thread had it listed as Hasbro, it's actually Mattel.


Its made using a Pololu Rome base, and a Hephaestus Arm with an esp32 as the controller and a ZenDriver as the motor control base. The 3 robots are the ones used by the Robotics Engineering Department at WPI during the plague year.

More pictures and the build logs here: The Child: Animatronic hack of Baby Yoda plush toy

The esp32 hosts a wifi network and a small website that uses websockets for fast RC control on any phone.

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Me in my Jedi Robes with Grogu

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Here is a more detailed build process for those interested.

The spine robot is the Hephaestus Arm, an open source 3d printed educational tool: Hephaestus-Arm/HephaestusArm2

The base is the ESP32 version of the Rome: WPIRoboticsEngineering/ZenRobotBuildKit

The RC over web stack is found in this Arduino Library i wrote and open sourced: WPIRoboticsEngineering/RBE1001Lib

The smart servos are now usable in Arduino thanks to the new library i wrote and open sourced: madhephaestus/lx16a-servo

The animation firmware is here: Halloween2020TheChild/FirmwareTheChild

Here is grogu, with his twin and the WPI Cosplay group at Halloween 2020

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Moving forward I wanted to make a fully animatronic head. I started by trying to re-cast the PVC head into silicone:

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But the mold cracked after the first run... so thats a bit of a dead end. I got one out of it to work with to design the of the mechs, but will need to go back to scratch for making the final molds.

Now I am working on upgrading the Grant Imahara Project 842 CAD models into printable molds. Project 842

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The goal is to have the entire system be something that is open source and able to be produced by anyone with a 3d printer.
 
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I have printed a set of Hand (glove?) molds!

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I used a vac chamber to pull the air out. The mode filled, but then began to leak causing the tips of the top two fingers to fail to fill.

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The issue came from the staircasing of the layers. I will try printing it in the other orientation to see if we can get a better mold seal.

Here are the files:

 
This is great! I'm trying to figure out how to do a simple neck and head move mod to my Sideshow Grogu. I want to carry him in a bag as part of my Mando cosplay for cons, and it would be awesome if he had some simple preprogrammed movement to make him life-like. I want something like the official Disneyland Grogu, but obviously a budget-friendly version.
 
William Miyamoto used a pan and scan mechanism for his head, you can buy it from servo city I believe.


For my first pass I did the same but have had trouble getting the proportions correct, the shoulders are too wide and the head too far up.

The method used by the Stan Winston school is very interesting, I'm thinking of trying their free seven day subscription to see the full video, but the excerpt below gives you a good idea as to how it works.

(apparently the Stan Winston video can't be embedded, search YouTube for "3-Axis Robotic Mechanisms: Animatronic Necks & Torsos - Part 1 - PREVIEW")

The head sits on a universal joint and two servos mount on the left and right pull it forward/back or tilt left/right. Another servo rotates the entire mechanism. I'm going to try this next.
 

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