Animated Grave Digger
Parts:
Old Timer Latex Head with Acrylic eyes – Ghost Ride Productions
Male Foam Body Form – Ghost Ride Productions
Male Left and Right Latex Hands – Ghost ride Productions
Shovel, Overalls, t-shirt, flannel shirt, boots and hat – Good will
LED Lantern – Pale Night Productions
Pan & Tilt System – Servo City
Prop-1 controller - Parallax EFX
The grave diggers head starts in a lowered position. It slowly rises up and then turns to the left and then to the right and then slowly lowers back down. The movements are random so they don’t always happen at the same time or follow a pattern.
There were 2 complex steps in creating this prop. The first was programming the Prop-1 controller. There are only 256 bytes of memory on the BASIC stamp and I needed to program 2 servos, one to tilt the head and the other to pan it left and right. These movements had to be smooth and have some randomness to them. I was able to pause each movement a random number of seconds and also slow the movement down so it was smooth. I have included the program I wrote at the end of this document.
The second difficult task was mounting the Pan & Tilt unit
into the body form and getting the latex head to fit onto it so it moved
naturally. Using a serrated kitchen knife I removing foam from the body form
so that the pan & tilt unit could move freely but not be too loose. I
screwed the unit onto a pair of 4 inch 1x2 blocks. Using polyurethane glue I
glued the blocks into the hole in the neck of the body form.
I mounted a rigid foam filled plastic bottle to the top of the Pan & Tilt unit with a ¾” PVC elbow bolted to the platform.
I had to hallow out a lot of the foam in the latex head. Especially around the neckline so the head would move smoothly.
I used some surgical tubing to counter balance the weight of the latex head when it was attached.
The
rest of the assembly was much easier. The hands were attached with duct tape.
Some of the foam on the arms was removed exposing the wire in order to slide
the hands on. Wood screws were used to wrap the fingers around the shovel and
the lantern.
The Prop-1 Controller was stuffed behind the flannel shirt and the power cable down the back and plugged into an electrical cord.
