Useful Links
Puppets
They make beautiful, stuffed animal-like puppets. Not all of their puppets are good candidates for animatronic retrofits. Their site has links to many Internet retailers of puppets.
A very cool looking site that caters to professional puppeteers and magicians. Most of the puppets here are out of our price range, but still worth a look to see how professionals do it.
Gund Kooky Creatures
Gund is best known for their amazing stuffed animals, but they also make some nice looking, if a bit pricey, puppets. Gund doesn’t have them on their site, but you can find them at lots of retailers including this one. You can also try a Google search for “Gund Kooky Kreatures”.
Servo Motors and Hardware
Lynxmotion not only makes various servo-based robot kits, they also sell all the little hardware bits separately! Their “Servo Erector Set” contains lots of useful brackets for mounting standard size servos (but not big or small ones).
Hitec is one of the major servo manufacturers.
Hobbico makes an inexpensive line of servos. So far, I’ve been very pleased with their products, especially the CS-80 Giant Scale servo.
Futaba is another major servo manufacturer.
Yet another servo manufacturer. They have some amazingly small servos.
JR is another one of the major servo manufacturers. They are introducing a line of servos for the robotics market. The Digital Standard Robot Servo looks like a particularly good value.
Tower Hobbies
A decent place to buy servos.
http://www.servocity.com/index.html
I haven’t dealt with this company, but they seem to have a great deal of interesting servo hardware.
A lot of detailed information about servos including how to rewire Airtronics servos. The servo chart has data on lots of different manufacturer’s servos.
Some good, basic info on servos.
Servo Controllers
They have quite a number of different controllers, including the Pololu Micro Serial Servo Controller and the Pololu USB 16 Servo Controller .
Power Supplies
Jameco has a couple of reasonably priced 5V tabletop power supplies ( part numbers 320080PS and 221487PS) which should work well for small animatronic systems.
Marlin P. Jones is a surplus electronics supplier. You can sometimes find very inexpensive power supplies here.
Vetco has a pretty good selection of surplus power supplies. Unfortunately, not all of their stock appears to be listed on their website, so you may need to either visit their Seattle area store, or contact them with a specific request.
Software
The creators of Visual Show Automation. They also sell a Remote Advanced Playback Unit which allows you to run shows without a computer. Ironically, it costs significantly more than an old PC, but it is arguably more robust.
Audacity is a free, cross-platform sound editor. It may not be the prettiest sound editor, but it is powerful, and the price is right. You can also run it on Windows, Mac and Linux!
Copyright 2007, Paul H. Dietz