Silly assignments keep getting in the way of what I really want to do!
Last weekend I made the jaw 3D with some balsa wood framing which will form a structure for the skin when I eventually design it.
I also realised that I hadn't posted a decent photo of the tail since it has been working in both directions. Here you can see the mechanism at the base of the tail, with two servos in opposing directions.
Last weekend I made the jaw 3D with some balsa wood framing which will form a structure for the skin when I eventually design it.
I also realised that I hadn't posted a decent photo of the tail since it has been working in both directions. Here you can see the mechanism at the base of the tail, with two servos in opposing directions.
The whole dragon works on an interval system at the moment, where the frequency of each action is programmed and so each action is independent of the others. This also means that I can trigger actions (with the controller I will eventually build, but that's another story) so that they occur more frequently than they would naturally occur - eg. to open the mouth so that the dragon can roar on cue, or to react to movement in his environment.
As you can see when the tail starts to move the whole body has a bit of a swagger. This has two causes - firstly that the table is not even remotely flat (it's made in three sections which are all at different levels and different heights), and secondly that the body has nothing to support it to prevent swaying...
...which is where legs need to come in. Yep, legs are next.
I started tonight with figuring out the physical position of the servos - you can see the left hip in the photo. I will program the framework for how these will work so that I can see what is going on before attaching the physical legs.