WICO@Home - Animation Station Update
In the first round of our collaboration with Lodestar Charter School, we created a prototype stop motion animation station that runs on a raspberry pi and uses arcade buttons to take pictures, erase frames and save video. As sometimes happens with projects like this, the last 10% of the features can take a long time to finish, but in this last round of funding from Cognizant making the future grant we were able to work with rockstar designer and engineer Tiffany Tseng to finish up the project.
She added some key features that both affect the aesthetics and functionality, but also we were able to incorporate a couple elements that make it easier to work at home - now that we’re all spending more time on kitchen table tinkering projects. Here’s a demo of the new version of the project in action:
Besides cleaning up the code so the station works more reliably and optimizing the screen size, Tiff added some really friendly welcome screens when the station starts up and when the video is saving. We decided to make the save show a looping animation to make it easy to capture video with your phone if you don’t want to go through the trouble of downloading it from the station.
And most importantly for working at home, the animation station can now work with keyboard presses, so if you can’t get to your shop to build the station, you can still use the software and have fun animating.
If you’re interested in animating at home, go ahead and check out the instructable that goes over how to set up your very own station and the git hub page with the code. And if you want to learn more about our process of updating the station we captured our notes on a notion page.
Let us know if you set up a station and start creating animations at home, we’d love to see all the different possibilities for stop motion exploration. Working with raspberry pi makes it easy to set up a relatively cheap station and then customize it as you like to make animations big and small. You can use what ever materials you have around the house and create your own stories. For more ideas check out our stop motion zine! Stay safe and tinker on!
Prototyping time and R&D with Lodestar Charter School students for this project was made possible through the generous support of Cognizant “Making the Future” grant