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Description
First and foremost: This is a project that I have had the pleasure to work on, but I'm not the creative mind behind it all. 
That would be David Wätte, puppet maker extraordinaire at the SPIXA puppet workshop in Västerhaninge, Stockholm. So while I have helped make some things pictured above (among other things, I worked on the stubborn donkey with its mousey riders, the poor lost Rudolph, and the angel mouse, as well as general mouse-casting, painting and other stuff), the credit for the calendar belongs with David. Here's his website.
That would be David Wätte, puppet maker extraordinaire at the SPIXA puppet workshop in Västerhaninge, Stockholm. So while I have helped make some things pictured above (among other things, I worked on the stubborn donkey with its mousey riders, the poor lost Rudolph, and the angel mouse, as well as general mouse-casting, painting and other stuff), the credit for the calendar belongs with David. Here's his website.What it is (if you don't remember it from the first time around):
A mechanical animatronic internet-controlled advent calendar. Whew, that's a mouthful. It's a physical model landscape with a webcam overlooking it. Each day up until Christmas, a new "event" (one or more mice that act out a small set of movements) is added to the landscape. The mice are controlled by servo motors like the ones used to control model airplanes, radio-controlled cars and the like. Once Christmas comes around, there should be something like a hundred motors running the whole thing.
How it works (if you can't read the Swedish instructions on the site):
Press the button under the image to control the calendar. Then press any of the 24 windows currently active to make things happen. (So at this date, on the 6th of December, the first six windows are active.) Sometimes you may have to wait a minute or two if someone else is already controlling it, since it's not Flash or anything like that, but an actual physical model you control in real-time in front of the camera. (This also means that if you're lucky, you might catch a glimpse of the puppet maker in his natural habitat. 
) You can zoom in, out and to the sides by clicking on the green arrows, and for some of the windows I'd recommend that you do that to see what is going on. (It may be hard to see events while the camera is zooming, since it is also servo-rigged and can be a bit shaky.) You currently get one minute to play around each time you activate it, but of course you can activate it any number of times you feel like.
) You can zoom in, out and to the sides by clicking on the green arrows, and for some of the windows I'd recommend that you do that to see what is going on. (It may be hard to see events while the camera is zooming, since it is also servo-rigged and can be a bit shaky.) You currently get one minute to play around each time you activate it, but of course you can activate it any number of times you feel like.The calendar was first built for Christmas 2010, but this year David decided to build it up again, and I have once more helped out in getting it ready. So I'm posting the above pictures as a way to spread the word. 
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© 2013 - 2024 ZombieArmadillo
Comments3
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looks pretty good, and sounds like an interesting project to work on.