Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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38 of 39 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Best (and only) book for building Haunted House animations, January 16, 2005
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.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Initial Impressions, December 10, 2003
I have not read the entire book yet, but have spent about two hours skimming through it in some detail. Overall, it covers everything very well, including basic theory (levers, etc). No need to fear if you are math challenged, as the formulas are not complex. At more advanced levels, it also covers home-made circuits as an alternative to store bought items. Note that no circuit board patterns are included, so you will have to either make them yourself or breadboard the circuit (probably a much easier option for most people, and it allows you to vary component specifications to suit your needs). Of particular note is that he includes several motion sensors, which are very desirable in terms of air/energy efficiency, as well as the shock effect for Halloween. The only negative comment I have is that all formulae and units are in SAE (oz-ft, PSI, etc). If you are from the US or UK, you should have no problem, but for the other 180 countries in the world, you will have to either learn the old measurements, or convert them to SI/metric. I am suprised by this, as SI formulae are simpler (not as many constants and conversions), and even the the UK is rapidly moving towards SI/metric. I hope that any future reprints of this book will take this into account. In summary, this book is an excellent ref for a homeowner or student with some tech ability, and I recommend it to anyone who is interested in making an animated display. I suspect my copy will have much use over the years, and do not envision passing it to other people. ie/ The book is a keeper, not one that you wish to circulate. DNP
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Good ideas, but hard to understand., November 22, 2005
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.
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