Woop! I survived the shitshow that was 2020. Now, what to do?

I know, I’ll extend my home IoT network, add more sensors, relays, LEDs, some well-being monitoring schtuff. Planning to control/monitor with HomeAssistant running on an RPi 4 (MQTT server, and ESPHome server).

For the rest of January I’ll be adding an ESP a day!

First, a simple 12V relay, powered by this cute lil ESP-01s. Relay will power 2 computer case fans, 1 which will pull air through a carbon filter; 1 will cool an RPi cluster.

Intro:
I decided to design b3ta to have a range of facial expressions, the goal being having movements in the face which mimic the movements of an animal (ears, nose, whiskers) and human (eyes, lips, mouth, eyelids, eyebrows).

Doing this will require anamatronics, or put otherwise, the planning of:

What needs to move and how
Testing the desired expressions/movements on the 3d model (rigging/animating in blender)
Abstracting these movements to mechanical motions
Prototyping
Building (3d printing, mechano, wire, foam, motors, linear actuators, guy cord, drive belts, steppers, ping pong balls, abs, silicon rubber, fymo, paint, foam, mesh, wire mesh, dye, …)
Wiring
Programming

… It’ll be a lot of work… Each of these points will be expanded on periodically, as completed and written up nicely. This may cause a delay in some parts as I work sporadically on different stages, to maintain variety in jobs and pique interest (also my problem solving and thought procesess are a little …frenetic).

I think I’ll post the work on the ears next. Or prototype head meshing (from last year).

After much deliberation over what to do for first fursuit, I have settled on a Red Panda. whom I shall call “b3ta”. b3ta, so called because I will be using him as a test bed for ideas, before further refinement and improvements (later version, or other fursuits).