Animatronics : A Guide to Animated Holiday Displays

This is a great book. If you like to build haunted houses, and want to add some moving and jumping animatronics to your haunt, you need this book. Commercial, finished animatronics cost thousands of dollars. You can build them yourself, do a higher-quality job, save a ton of money, and have a lot of fun doing it, using this book.Also, I can, with some confidence, say that this is the ONLY book in existence that covers this subject matter. There are tons of books on robotics out there, but those are really solving a different problem. You probably aren't trying to spend months building a complex robot with a dozen servo-motors, sophisticated movement, and reasoning skills. You are trying to spend a few days building a ghoul that pops out a trash can when patrons draw near. This book is for the latter. I have looked hard, and near as I can tell, this is the only book that covers that type of material.This book starts at the perfect place for the only slightly clued home builder (you know how to operate your cordless drill, but you only have a vague notion of what a bushing is). In a highly-readable way, the author moves you to the point where you can comfortably grab a motor, a motion sensor, some linkage parts and a pile of steel tubing or wood or PVC pipe and build a fairly sophisticated animated figure. By the end, you'll know about leverage and 4-bar mechanisms and the supporting electronics.This book does not have recipes for building a ton of specific animations. It works through several specific examples in detail (a figure pops-up out of a trash can, a witch stirs a cauldron, etc.), but the idea is that you use your knowledge to design and build your own haunted house ideas.I like the style of the book. The author is informal and often amusing; he has a dry wit. But none of that annoying folksy tone that you sometimes see in other books. Just comfortable and accessible.I found that there was one odd thing about this book. It might be because the book is a few years old. The book does a great job telling you how to construct mechanisms that move. It does a great job of telling you various methods for triggering a movement. However, when it gets to the part in-between, where you need to connect the trigger to your motors, the book for some reason descends to fairly sophisticated low-level electronics. The author tells you to buy diodes, micro-farad capacitors, 100K resistors, and 555 timer chips, and breadboard them together. And then proceeds to teach an entry-level college electronics course at the end of the book, so you can tie it all together. Yikes! This is fun, to be sure, but it's at the wrong level of abstraction, and could take you days to decipher and perhaps even weeks when you throw in debugging time. At this point, there are many stores, both online and retail, that sell inexpensive controllers for these purposes, for regular motors, servo-motors, light and sound timing, etc. You just plug in your sensors and motors and lights into these devices, turn a few knobs to record the sequence of events, and you are done. If you are a haunter, you want to get the job done by building your mechanisms, slapping on a few sensors and an off-the-shelf controller, and then move onto the next cool project for your haunted house. You don't want to solder NAND gates and try to control the frequency of square waves to control an R/C servo-motor. Again, perhaps the author went to first principles in this part of the book because these off-the-shelf controllers did not exist when the book was written, but my strong recommendation is, skip the last part of the book and just go buy a simple animatronics controller. This is the 21st century, after all.I don't want to leave this review on a negative note. This book is wonderful! I thoroughly enjoyed reading it, I learned a ton, and nowhere else will you see this material written down. If you are a home haunter, or have a professional haunted house, or even if you put moving Christmas decorations on your lawn, you absolutely need this book. And READ it! Don't just let it sit on the shelf. You'll be glad you did.

First of all, if you are looking for specific plans (ie. diagrams, blueprints, supply list, detailed photos of finished prop) then you might be disappointed with this book.The purpose of this book is to give you the basic knowledge (some math required) to create any mechanical prop that YOU envision. The author tells you how to make things move their arms, or jump up, or spin around, etc. Then, you decide what that thing should be made of (wood, metal or PVC), how big the thing should be, what the thing should do and what the thing should look like. The author also deals with both electric and pnuematic motors and types of sensors so you don't have to hide in the bushes and trigger your props.My only complaint is that the author doesn't give you any hints on how to cover your mechanical skeleton. The author leaves the creative part totally up to you but a few basic pointers would have been helpful.

The author over complicates everything in this book, going in depth with totally unnecessary formulas that's likely to confuse novices...especially those who never worked with electronics or mechanics before . Since the field of animatronics requires a vast knowledge of different trades, it's pretty hard to cram all the various aspects into one book, but since his aim was along the lines of casual Holiday displays and not professional , he should have kept it way more simpler to cater to those who just want to make some simple props for Halloween. You will get more knowledge going on Youtube and watching videos (for free) about the separate subjects ( mold making/casting, microcontrollers/electronics ,pneumatics , mechanical mechanisms/movements, etc.) than you will by getting this book.Case in point, he goes all in depth about electronics when a user could easily instead buy a plug-and-play prop controller ("PicoBoo") for about $70 and very little electrical knowledge is required. Although, since this book was published over a decade ago, maybe those didn't exist then?Probably not.Anyways,most the reviews on here are a decade old as well, so what was once a 5-star book back in 2004 when this info was scarce and robotic supplies were more expensive , is now in 2014 probably a 2 or 3 star book in my opinion.

This was an excellent book for me to learn about pneumatics. I had no prior experience and was interested in creating pneumatic props for Halloween. The author clearly explains the different pneumatic components, sources, and tips while supporting explanations with good math.Additionally, the section on four-bar and accordion linkages was very useful.Note to other readers: The section on automation using microcontrollers is a little out of date, the amateur community is now adopting the Arduino microcontroller. Also, Grainger is mentioned as a source that only sells to businesses, but this is no longer the case.

This book is not for beginners. The only way to truly understand the directions is to be an electrician, a plumber or a Home Depot buff. The book is geared toward building pneumatics from scratch. Now -a -days props can be made with ready-made motors and pvc pipe attachments. I would say this book is great for those looking to pneumatics and already have the 'know-how' with the tools and materials.

Great book, not as detailed as I wish it were but if you can find the products it's instructs you to use, you'll be fine.

Best book ever written on the subject. Only problem is it is expensive for a softcover book. My first copy, bought several years ago,Great burnt up in a house fire. This was one of the few of the books I replaced out of three thousand. Shocked to have to pay over sixty dollars to buy a new one.

This book had great ideas for some great displays, but be prepared to spend some time deciphering it. It's so involved that I decided to wait and attempt something before next Halloween.

Not for the novice for sure.