Uploaded August 2012 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
This is an animatronic owl that I built around 2005. It previously had a control system that I created which had the animation stored on an audio CD that fed into a bit of circuitry that I made that converted the audio coming out of the CD player into a mono audio channel and a RS232 data channel. The data was fed into a hobby servo controller. Technology has moved forward so recently I upgraded it to have a new controller that was embedded directly into the branch that the owl sits on. This new controller that I designed plays .wav audio files from a SD card and also streams out the serial data. Instead of fussing around with CD players and other electronics that once took up a lot of space, you now just pug this guy in and he runs.
This is an animatronic owl that I built around 2005. It previously had a control system that I created which had the animation stored on an audio CD that fed into a bit of circuitry that I made that converted the audio coming out of the CD player into a mono audio channel and a RS232 data channel. The data was fed into a hobby servo controller. Technology has moved forward so recently I upgraded it to have a new controller that was embedded directly into the branch that the owl sits on. This new controller that I designed plays .wav audio files from a SD card and also streams out the serial data. Instead of fussing around with CD players and other electronics that once took up a lot of space, you now just pug this guy in and he runs.
