THE TRUTH OF GENPETS
Process (a low down on the physical construction)
It's hard to break down 8 months of work into a digestible format, but let’s have a go anyways. This also helps give an idea of why the starting price for a non-animatronics Genpet is $800, the material cost alone for each Genpet is about $200, and as you can see, there's a lot of work to assemble and build each sculpture.
Everything you see, times 19 units.
1. White layer base plastic
1a. Clay sculpt of base plastic 1b. Silicon mould of sculpt
1c. Positive plastic cast
sanding. This part becomes
the mould for vacuum forming
thin plastic overtop of. 1d. Vacuum forming of styrene plastic and then cutting, finishing etc.
2. Creature
2a. Sculpt of creature 2b. 2 part silicon mould of
creature+ 2 part plaster
2c. foam latex or liquid latex casting of creature
(Yields hollow versus not, depending on what sort of movement is desired)
3. Sculpt of top plastic
3a. A sculpt is made over the
white layer to ensure a fast and perfect fit 3b. A silicon mould is then taken of this combined piece
3c. The positive plaster
is cast + hours &
hours of sanding 3d. The clear plastic is vacuum formed over the plaster mould and then cut/finished
4. Circuitry
One main circuit for control of the animal, and one sub board for control of the heart monitor
4a. Design of circuits
4b. Print process of 38 circuit boards
4c. Drilling of 1839 holes 4d. Soldering and completion (heart monitors pictured)
5. Microchip programming
In first and second year college we experimented with the basic stamp. it's an easy platform, but limited and costly, thus for genpets I moved onto normal, production grade chips. My friend Rob Sherwin taught me the basics and got me going.
5a. Program for controlling
fresh strip, heart monitor and
animatronics 5b. physical code dumps onto blank chips (Test, recode as necessary. repeat.)
6....