This is starting to look like something! I think I have all of the degrees of freedom figured out now.
There will be three servos mounted on top. Two for head motions (I already have that working on my workbench) and one for a beak. (Trivial)
Getting a stepper to rotate the base is trivial, too.
Now I need to get a linear servo to allow it to lean forward and back like in the other photo I posted.
Here's the stepper all working smoothly now: https://youtu.be/LIjCy0gt4Pk
One the weekend I came up with a way to use the "sleep" feature on the stepper drivers programmatically to keep the motors cool.
Frustratingly, linear servos are very expensive (around $100), and I can't find a lot of information on them online. Just a few short videos from vendors and/or hobby shops.
I'm just gonna have to study the data sheets and hope I get it right.
Money isn't really the thing that's the objective here. I've spent a lot so far getting myself into a position where I can keep going for years to come! But $100 kinda stings when I need one per Creature of this style.
Here's an earlier video I did showing the head motion! https://youtu.be/x5iaWE-txS0
I'm gonna build something using this technique into the piece that sits on top of the head mount.
My Creature Controller can handle eight servos and eight steppers at once. It's pretty cool. If I want to lose one of the servos I could go to 16 steppers since I'm using latches as muxes. I'd just need one more address line to go 8 -> 16. I'm all out of GPIO pins on the Pi Pico now.
