About the Animatronic

For the Animatronics competition we were challenged to design and create an interactive animatronic to encourage young children to read. Our teams solution was Terry the Turtle, a fully custom animatronic that speaks to children about any book they scan. When a child scans a book's barcode, terry delivers a fun and engaging summary. We developed a system using Arduino and Raspberry Pi to run the entire system from the speakers to the screen. The entire enclosure and mechanical systems were designed an built from the ground up. Terry was built to be fully self sustaining requiring only a wall outlet, thanks to its integrated internet connectivity, automated controls, and built in air compressor sustaining the pneumatic system. All of the software and code we wrote to synchronize movement speech and book recognition. 

This project combined mechanical design, fabrication, and electronics integration to fully build. During our time competing in this competition we placed third in the Pennsylvania state competition witch qualified us to compete at the national competition