Animate Your Robot with Bottango

Evan McMahon's visual tool provides an easier way to control robots and animatronics.

Cabe Atwell
3 years agoRobotics

Making your robot move with animations can be a hurdle. It's wicked to see your design in operation virtually. Now, you can control your robots, animatronics, and all types of hardware just by using Bottango, a visual tool for 3D control by Evan McMahon. The robot-controlling program features 3D tools like bezier curves, timelines, and keyframes to make animations for a robot.

By using these 3D tools, you can move and pose virtual joints and hardware effectors. Poses can be set by selecting individual joints and moving them around. Motions can be produced using the timeline and curve editor. These tools make it easy for you to control where, when and how the robot moves. Physics can also be applied to create robot simulations. Custom motors and other hardware can even be defined and controlled using Bottango.

The workflow here is to model your robot’s structure using the built-in tools to create a close approximation of your design or import .OBJ or .FBX 3D files in Bottango, set up virtual joints and motors, then animate them with audio. You can make and modify keyframes and interpolation curves in the animation toolset as well.

The program uses the Arduino driver side sketch, which has C++ Arduino functionality. The tool comes with the sketch when it’s downloaded and installed, allowing you to play around with it. The program also employs the 3D animation and control software on a system developed in C# + Unity. Unity is a powerful tool commonly used outside of game development. It’s perfect for Bottango because it’s a 3D visualization and UI software toolkit.

Bottango is compatible with Windows, Mac, and Linux. The program communicates with an Arduino-compatible microcontroller, which will then send instructions to the hardware. You won’t even have to write any code for this, either. The open source, Arduino-compatible code enables you to access its entire functionality. McMahon plans on adding lightning animation support, blending and a library of supported hardware.

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