Crafting a Raven: An Animatronic Assistant
An animatronic raven that talks back: a personal assistant with attitude. I designed it in Fusion 360 and built it from servos, 3D-printed parts, wires and feathers. A Raspberry Pi with a microphone is its brain and holds the conversation through ChatGPT.
2024 Soldering Table
I made it as a researcher on The Psycholudic Approach at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, where it was used in research sessions.
The feathers
The electronics and the code weren’t the hard part; the feathers were. My first attempts looked more like a chicken than a raven. Every feather had to be picked, trimmed and placed by hand before the 3D-printed frame read as a raven.
Its successor is the lighter Animatronic Crow Version 2.
How it was made
const beak = new Servo(PIN_BEAK);
async function speak(text) {
const audio = await tts(text);
syncBeak(beak, audio); // flap per syllable
return play(audio);
}
