# Modding the Elvis Animatronic Bust



## Retroplayer (Feb 22, 2013)

So I finally ended up buying a 3D printer and one of my long-time projects that was put on hold is in full-steam mode again. I am in the process of redesigning the parts of the Wowwee Alive Animatronic Elvis bust to use standard servos instead of the custom gearbox DC motors and pots. This will allow any servo controller to control the animatronic head.

The goal is to make it as much of a drop-in replacement as possible, requiring the least amount of modding. Just remove the old assemblies, assemble a few of the original parts on to the replacement parts and screw it all back in. However, I am also throwing in some enhancements as I go.

I have mostly completed the eye mechanisms. All that is left for this is that a few linkages need to be finalized and the model needs to be tweaked a bit to make it printable due to all the overhangs. I did move the eye U/D linkage directly into the main eye mechanism (if you haven't been inside your Elvis yet, you may not know what I am talking about.) Currently there is an off-board motor in the top of the head that raises and lowers the whole eye mechanism pivoting on the nose piece. The real benefit to moving it into the main assembly is that the eye mechanism can then be used in future animatronic projects since it is all in one. You would just need to fix the nose piece into your own underskull.

I have been printing the parts out as I go to test fit and so far all is going well.










In the eye mech, you get:
Eyes L/R
Eyes U/D
Left Eyelid
Right Eyelid (though I may link these together)
Eyebrows U/D (linked, not separate)








Next up is the jaw and mouth. I never liked the lip-curl effect, so I will most likely leave that out completely or look into the possibility of adding more expression to the mouth (versus jaw just moving up and down.)

The neck mechanism will end up being completely redesigned because most people that want to use the head, want to put it on another body. I plan to try to make it work with the original bust as well, however.

__
https://flic.kr/p/omhS1R


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## Retroplayer (Feb 22, 2013)

Designed up the head turning base. It includes an adapter to mount on the servo which fits into the existing gear. This one was fairly quick since it is pretty simple (though Sketchup crashed and ruined the model at one point and forced me to start over.) Of course, as with the eyes, some tweaking will be needed in order to make it printable on a home 3D printer.

It looks a little different than the OEM because I removed a lot of unnecessary material. The existing gear and drive shaft fit perfectly.

Rather than design fragile plastic links for the various servos in the eyes, I am going to place mounts for standard servo ball links. Then stronger metal pushrods can be used. It will also same me quite a bit of frustration getting those links perfect in a modeling program. A few of the links I had already printed up seemed a little delicate and if I go much bigger, they will begin to interfere with other movements.

I believe I should have some pics of the assemblies printed and installed and possibly some video of it in action.


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## Retroplayer (Feb 22, 2013)




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## bobzilla (Nov 13, 2008)

This is quite an amazing undertaking! 
Can't wait to see the finished piece.
Kudos to you!


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## Retroplayer (Feb 22, 2013)

I am getting very close to being able to show off a demonstration. I will definitely want to go back and make a few final tweaks. I had to file some things down a little more than I should which means things were too tight. With 3D printing, your dimensions do not always come out spot on and it takes a bit to figure out all the tolerances you need adjust for. So a few dimensions here and there need to fixed, but the overall fit was pretty good.

Still working on the nose piece. That didn't print so well, so I need to make some adjustments to it. Then we need some servo mounts on the underside. 5 total sub-micro servos (SG90s) in this mechanism. You can see the two servos on the top line up pretty well with the eyelid links (if you remove the existing arms.) The exiting arms flop around a little so it looks like the middle servo is in the way, but they clear them just fine. The original re-design just had servo arms pretty tight up against the middle servo to actuate the eyelids. I am still up in the air if I want to keep the left and right separate or just link the two together to just one servo. Then the other would be for the eyebrows. I would lose the ability to wink, I guess.

I guess this is not all that interesting to those here, but if someone does have any suggestions or input, it would be appreciated.


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## Retroplayer (Feb 22, 2013)

bobzilla said:


> This is quite an amazing undertaking!
> Can't wait to see the finished piece.
> Kudos to you!


Thanks, Bob! Up until about 3 months ago, I had never done any 3D modeling, so it has been quite the learning experience for me. Thankfully I am a persistent and determined personality!

I am hoping to work myself up to the ability to build animatronics from scratch. My friend is a sculptor, so I will have plenty of things to practice with. Aside from this project, I am also experimenting with 3D scanning to take in his sculptures and design the mechanisms around it. He is building a 3 foot tall caterpillar (like from Alice in Wonderland.) I have a little 8 inch model of it, but it turns out that trying to print such tiny mechanism is not simple. But with some of the things I have learned here, I think I can figure it out.


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## bobzilla (Nov 13, 2008)

I am pretty blown away!
I don't do any animatronic stuff myself, but I sculpt stuff for Halstaff here on the forum. He takes it from there, and animates it.
Again......really impressive!



Retroplayer said:


> Thanks, Bob! Up until about 3 months ago, I had never done any 3D modeling, so it has been quite the learning experience for me. Thankfully I am a persistent and determined personality!
> 
> I am hoping to work myself up to the ability to build animatronics from scratch. My friend is a sculptor, so I will have plenty of things to practice with. Aside from this project, I am also experimenting with 3D scanning to take in his sculptures and design the mechanisms around it. He is building a 3 foot tall caterpillar (like from Alice in Wonderland.) I have a little 8 inch model of it, but it turns out that trying to print such tiny mechanism is not simple. But with some of the things I have learned here, I think I can figure it out.


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## halstaff (Nov 18, 2009)

I'm watching this thread with extreme interest.
I have an Elvis bust that I had planned to hack in a similar manner this year but other projects have taken precedence. 
I've never done 3D printing before either so I'm hoping to learn how to do this by following your lead.


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## heresjohnny (Feb 15, 2006)

I'm keeping my eye on this thread.


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## Retroplayer (Feb 22, 2013)

halstaff said:


> I'm watching this thread with extreme interest.
> I have an Elvis bust that I had planned to hack in a similar manner this year but other projects have taken precedence.
> I've never done 3D printing before either so I'm hoping to learn how to do this by following your lead.


I have had 4 of them since 2008. If you had search around for info, I am the same Retroplayer from the Robocumminty forums that was reverse engineering the original electronics and firmware. After getting far enough to realize that was a lot of work for something pretty limiting, I went on to attempting to design a custom controller which would connect to the existing motors and pots and give them an SSC style interface. I got stuck with the motor PID control on that. But wrote a ton of libraries for the arduino to do the frame syncing, interfacing with the ADC chips, and doing the SSC controls.

So 6 years of sitting on these not getting a full functional hack! Of course in the meantime, 3D printers became affordable and reliable (sorta) so here we are now. It's amazing the world of possibilities this opens up. In just a few hours I can design, print, test, change, and re-iterate until it is perfect.

The real limitation is that you have to really think ahead of time how prints will come out. I have the eye mechanism alone chopped up into about 30 pieces or so as well as custom surfaces and tabs to snap and glue it all together. Also, 3D printing is not precise. If I measure a circle at 2mm, I need to make it 2.4mm in order for it to print at 2mm. And this appears to be different for inside diameter or outside diameter. There are probably all sorts of settings that can dial this in a little better, but it takes practice. That's the sort of stuff I have run into here.

When designing the parts, it really helps to model in even the parts you aren't going to print (like the servos) because you can then model off the faces of those to get an exact fit. I started with the base and just one after another, started modeling right in place building it up. Each piece becomes a component, so you can keep it all separated.

Printer is a Solidoodle 4, btw which just dropped to $599 (after I had just paid $1000 for it two months ago.)

For 3D scanning, I have experimented with the Xbox 360 kinect camera, but the software seems to be tied very closely to graphics hardware in your computer, so I ordered some upgrades. I also just ordered a ultraviolet line laser and HD webcam to experiment with 3D scanning that way using David's software (http://www.david-3d.com/)


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## Retroplayer (Feb 22, 2013)

Version 1 of the bottom half (actually top half) with 2 more servo mounts and the brackets to hold the tops of the eye. This image shows off some of the limitations of the 3D printing. As you can see, the hole for the eye bracket is pretty rough and the other side actually broke off trying to remove the supports. Those brackets and even the servo mounts are a little brittle like that. You can strengthen them a little by subjecting the whole thing to acetone vapor which helps fuse all the plastic.

Version 2 so far has the brackets removed to separate parts, but even then, it will tough to print them. There is no easy way to print that without supports. The brackets will likely get a little beefier in version 3 and the servo mounts will also get some structural supports.

PLA is a little more flexible, so it doesn't snap as easily. Great for areas where you want things to be able to flex a little. However, I have trouble getting accuracy with PLA. Right now, all the parts are printed in ABS. But in the end, there will probably be a mixture of the two materials based on their properties.

I think I will be finishing up the nose hinge (for up/down movement) so it can be printed and change all the pivot points to accept servo ball links and call it a night. I need to pick up some ball links and push rods before I can do a demo, anyway.

For the bottom and top pieces here, I think I will throw in some registration pins and holes that can be melted together to bond the two. BTW, for glue you can use acetone with a bit of the filament material (save your supports you cut off) to create a cement. Just brush it on both surfaces and press together.


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## Retroplayer (Feb 22, 2013)

Well, I disappeared for a while there guys. Sorry about that. My previous 3D printer sucked. I ended up getting side tracked on upgrading it just to get decent prints. I ended up just buying a different one!

I also ended up redesigning the eye mech. There were some pretty major flaws in it that broke the model down whenever I tried to fix them. Sketchup is not a parametric modeler, so making changes is not so easy!

Anyway. I know this will look mostly the same, but there are quite a few added parts to it now. I ended up modeling as much of the original pieces as possible in order to make sure everything fit together. I also added a joint to the nose piece in order to keep the entire mechanism as one piece.

I am back at it again. I have modeled a few more parts in the eye mechanism and made some tweaks since my last post, but nothing too exciting. I did end up receiving the USB servo controller, so hopefully I can post up a demonstration of the eyes soon. Sorry for getting everyone hyped up and then jetting. lol Life, you know?


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## ryschwith (Oct 27, 2014)

Possibly off-topic, but... what printer did you upgrade to?


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## mikkojay (Sep 15, 2014)

Glad to see you sticking with it- I sometimes find my short attention span making me neglect long-term projects. Thanks for documenting your experiences and sharing them!
-Mike


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## Retroplayer (Feb 22, 2013)

ryschwith said:


> Possibly off-topic, but... what printer did you upgrade to?


My new printer is the CTC Creator Dual. It is a Flashforge/Makerbot clone with dual extruders. $540 shipped on the ebay.


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## halstaff (Nov 18, 2009)

I know how life and other projects can derail our plans. Great to see you back to work on this!


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## Retroplayer (Feb 22, 2013)

Tweak, print, tweak, print. Still working on it. Trying to make sure everything is printable and reliable. I've lost track of what version I am on now. But I keep running into little things here and there as I print and assemble. The base alone takes almost 2 hours to print! So mistakes are time consuming.

I ended up purchasing some PVA filament for supports which is water soluble (just drop the whole thing in water and the supports dissolve away.) Expensive stuff, but my experiments with it so far have not been successful. If I can get it working, it will make things much easier to print.

I did get one version fully printed and servos installed. When I tried to control the eyes left/right I found that things were a bit too tight and the servo slipped on the horn. I would love to put some teeth inside the horn, but I am not really sure how to do that in Sketchup.

In the below picture, you can see that the servo mounts snapped off on the one side. I have made those a little more robust. 





















In this last picture is the modified nose piece that will allow one of the servos on the base to rotate the eyes up/down.


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## Coldblackice (May 11, 2015)

Awesome thread/progress, Retro! Looking forward to more developments -- subbed!


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