WARNING: RANTY STREAM OF CONCIOUSNESS ESSAY AHEAD

I just recently started building FOSS in this space in stealthmode, things are not looking good long term.

Animatronics as an artform are facing extinction. There are VERY few people in the community with technical expertise to maintain the mechanical and technical aspects of the characters. And companies are abandoning them en masse in favor of screens. To illustrate the HN relevant challenges lets walk through the "stack" of a singing rat.

You have the mech itself, its guts a stationary frame made of some material with mechanical extremities attached to it. that are usually animated using either compressed air, or servos. As well as some kind of control board witha bank of relays for actuating said servos/valves.

Each character is then connected to a central control box that takes in movements for the entire stage as well as audio or even video to play back in sync.

Those movements are all encoded differently just to make this super easy btw :)

Lets actually talk about movements next! There are many different companies that produced different shows for Familiy Entertainment Centers and theme parks, all of them programming movements on bespoke systems, as no standard had ever existed.

Those movements being stored in a variety of ways. Many of the original Chuck E Cheese and Showbiz Pizza place signals from the late 70s to the early 90s being stored on Reel to Reel tape. Left audio channel being the human audio and then the right channel dedicated to digital blips and beeps which were in some cases a form of hi-lo encoding that would be decoded by an IC into movements for the show.

Good news: some of these tapes were digitized!

Unfortunately, the movement tracks were intentionally stripped out by the collectors who ripped them for less than savory reasons we can get into later.

Now forget legacy all together, what are the EXISTING solutions? Well for programming software in the public sphere it seems youre relegated to program blue by DSFRobots. Its old, slow and not well maintained, on top of that it's entirely closed source.

As for new control boxes you might most immedately find the bluebox also made by DSFRobots.

I do not single them out to disparage their name, credit entirely where credit is due, i do believe thay are a market leader in the space genuinely for hobbyists.

My issue is that the founder of DSFR has nunerous allegations against him of predatory behavior against minors with screenshots as well as his involvement in some kind of nostalgia gang who are purposefully trying to hoarde information for a currently unknown reason.

Theres a tiger king documentary of drama there to unpack but i diagress.

Lets also take a quick aside to talk about cosmetics, a lot of the original molds to make the masks and the companies that made them are gone entirely, people are trying to make 2nd gen masks by casting their patched latex ones.

So with that there ought to be a massive preservation project to do the following

- 3d scan existing cosmetics so new plugs can be resin printed and new latex masks can be reproduced

- Document existing showtapes and signals and back the signals up to an agnostic format ala llvm intermediary

- build an open source hardware replacement for the bluebox that can identify and read any signal type using a dsl for parsing the audiodata into signals for movement

- build an open source software repalcement for program blue

- go out and document your local robots before they're gone for good!

Im not asking anyone explicitly to dedicate any time to this, but if ive sparked your interest these videos are a good starting point to the whole rabbithole. (All are mildly in conflict if you can grok that)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLMRKaF31ko

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2fC4oTGhbcY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTmhS6hcY-A