Crazy Animatronic Chimpanzee Project Help

[mbrzezowski]

I am a middle school teacher and we were given a Wowwee Alive animatronic chimpanzee. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WowWee_Alive_Chimpanzee). It came without a remote, so we thought we would create a new controller for it based on a Raspberry pi and/or an Arduino unit.

We have traced all wires for all of the motors (two wire, so I don't know how it centered motors before. Our plan is just to have all motors move to one direction for x mount of time to put them at their full extent and then bring them each back the amount of time it takes to center them) and have verified the motors work by applying power via a 3v battery.

Can anyone give a good overall plan for us and suggestions for motor controls. We have two, 2-channel motor drivers right now, but I was hoping for something more compact than having 7 of those (we have 13 motors in this chimp).

We are starting by making a device that successfully can control a few motors and will expand from there. I am OK if this takes a long time and kids add to the functionality each year.

Thank you in advance for ideas.

- Mike

[Franklin97355]

The link does not give much information on the workings of the chimp so if you could you can give us something to work with, perhaps schematics or pictures and the motors that control the chimp and what you want it to do.

[mbrzezowski]

Now that I look at it closer, I see that there may be encoders on the motors. It looks like they are fed with power and then there is also a set of three wires coming off of them. I also found that there are only 8 motors.

Here is a link to our knowledgebase about the wires.

Let me know what other information would be helpful. Thank you for your help and patience with an electronics neophyte helping even more neophytic kids ;)

[Franklin97355]

The three wires look suspiciously like servo colors. Have you tested them or tried to control the motors with servo controls?

[mbrzezowski]

I will try that next week when I have the students again. Thank you.