Animatronics: Guide to Holiday Displays

By Edwin Wise

Author Edwin Wise takes the reader inside his world of robotics in an innovative guide to designing, developing, and building animated displays centered around the holidays of Halloween and Christmas. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0790612194
• ISBN13: 9780790612195
• Release Date: August 2000
• Publisher: Cengage Learning
• Length: 273 Pages
• Weight: 1.13 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 7.4" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

Way advanced!

I'm still reading this one because some of the concepts are a little advanced for me. Lots of info and great ideas. I would not recomend this one for beginners. Try some stuff with radio controlled cars first before attempting some of these projects.

THE bible for animatronics

Hands down, this is the absolute best reference available on animatronics. I belong to a Haunters' forum & many of the members are very familiar with this book & it's the very first thing we recommend when someone new asks for a good book on animatronics.

Best (and only) book for building Haunted House animations

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 yo

Great resource for Halloween

This book had everything I needed to get some animation into my displays! I highly recommend this book. Mr. Wise gives all the information you will need (math, physics, etc), but presents it in an easy to understand format. Be the talk of your neighborhood next Halloween