Post #800819 by TheLuckyParrot on Thu, Feb 20, 2020 12:02 PM

For over the past year I have been working on what I believe to be a unique project, and it's time to get it off my FB page and here into this more focused community so that it can shared with fellow enthusiasts. This could inspire me, inspire others, and/or create a dialog for collaboration and idea sharing that might benefit one and all. So here we go!

Trader Sam's Enchanted Tiki Bar in Downtown Disney is well-known to Tiki Central and needs no background or history from me. And I am going to assume the same level of familiarity with their indoors event entertainment triggered by various drink orders from their menu. It's part and parcel as to why ETB is so much fun.

Here is my project goal: take a set of those event entertainment experiences, re-imagine them, re-engineer them, miniaturize them, and repackage them all into a vintage television cabinet and make those experiences portable - starting in my own home Tiki bar. I will have an animated volcano that riffs off the ETB Krakatoa! event, and Trader Sam himself as a riff off the ETB beer pull jungle drum event, and (!!!) my own shipwreck sink-the-ship-in-a-bottle effect. I will have companion audio and lighting effects, including bell ringing and skipper shouting (no, I will not be having any water squirting thank-you-very-much!). I will have ambient audio including my own playlist of vintage tropical music and rain forest sounds when no event has been triggered. And the control for this will be WiFi-enabled allowing the system to be controlled from behind the bar no matter where it ends up being located in the overall space.

This involves quite a bit of small-scale carpentry fabrication and sculpting, and it also involves a huge amount of mechanical engineering and micro-controller integration. For the latter, I have chosen to use Arduino. I do not need the CPU power of Raspberry Pi but I do need to take advantage of smaller form factors and greater GPIO ports. And, to be totally transparent, I am already a tiny bit familiar with the C language. All of this fits well with my background. I have an aptitude for engineering (you might pick up on that when you realize that I am doing this off the top of my head as I go). I have remodeled multiple homes that we have lived in (not a flipper) and have a large amount of experience with woodworking tools and have all those tools readily available. And I have been in the IT industry for 3 decades so computer technology comes easy to me. My main weakness is as an artist and I know many of you can do much much better, but I get by.

There. That's my intro and preamble. In real time, I am actually pretty far along and am assembling the completed feature sub-systems into the finished cabinet (which is a major task in its own right). But I will start from the beginning stages with my photos and videos and work towards the current work in progress, which is on my workbench even now. I hope that you enjoy the project and engage freely even with a critical eye. The whole reason I am here is for the sharing, and that goes both ways both good and bad. Thank you in advance for your participation.