Animatronics are wayy cool, but the hacker community rarely ventures farther than a few hobby servos and "dem-blinkin' LEDs." In this workshop, I'll get you cozy with tentacle mechanisms that you can build with just a laser cutter and a few hand tools. There are three big takeaways from this workshop. We'll build up a two-stage controller reusable in other projects, muscle up our vocabulary of off-the-shelf parts for cable mechanisms, and discover a few laser-cut design techniques.
I'm a software-and-electronics engineer by day and Hackaday writer on some nights. I've spent a couple years in the R&D rapid prototyping space, and I currently develop instrument software and custom electronics for liquid-handling instruments in a factory that makes synthetic RNA. These days, after-hours I'm usually dabbling in the garage shop on some oddball laser-cut project.