Like most of my goofy ideas, this one started with a scribbly sketch:  
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We were brainstorming what projects we might do for our holiday event using the Hummingbird kit from Bird Brain, and I thought it might be fun to do a fireplace, with flickering lights for the fire, and a Santa Claus that wiggled like he was stuck in the chimney.  While I was tinkering with that idea, I realized that the distance sensor would be a perfect trigger - warm your hands by the fire, and Santa’s legs move!  Fun!  

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With that in mind, I played a bit with the new function on ChatGPT that allows for some limited free image generation.  With some fairly simple prompting and adjustment, it generated this source image, which didn’t really figure into my final design, but turned out to be a nice inspiration for the look and feel I was going for.

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With that initial stuff design stuff rolling along, it was time to tinker!  My favorite activity!  I busted out some cardboard, wooden sticks, Makedo tools, and other random crafting materials to get an idea of how best to make a mechanism for wiggling Santa legs.  I knew that I would want to use the positioning motor from the Hummingbird kit, but it was tricky to figure out just how best to make the legs move back and forth the way I was imagining.  Many punched holes and bent paper clips later, I had at least gotten a decent prototype put together.  By mounting the wires to opposite ends of the servo wheel-thingy (what’s that called anyway?) I was able to get the legs to move back and forth in opposite directions at the same time.  Figuring out the best place to mount the motor was tricky too.  With some of those tinkery-prototype-things out of the way, it was time to do some laser-cutting!

Laying out a test piece of ⅛” plywood was pretty straightforward to make a more precise rig of the leg mockup I’d worked out.  I took some measurements, planned where some holes would go, and even laid out some small concentric circles to make wooden washers/bushings for the pivot points.  Shout out to the team at Flux Lasers (no relation) for their super user-friendly Beam software.  I was fairly new to the program when I started and it was very fast and easy to learn the finer points!

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Once that was done, it was time to lay out some pieces of cardboard to make the chimney.  Once again, creating some shapes in the Beam software was pretty straightforward, and I cut out several pieces of various shapes to make the layers.

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Another dive into the craft bin and with the judicious application of hot glue, the final form was starting to take shape!  Santa’s feet were sufficiently hilarious, and the combination of pivot points, paper clips, and the carefully mounted positioning servo made for a wonderfully ludicrous movement, once I dialed in the amount of rotation in the Hummingbird Snap software.  

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At this point it was all the fun stuff - finishing touches!  I poked some high-tech-holes through the base of the chimney with my patented laser-guided-cardboard-fiber-separator (the point of my phillips screwdriver) and put two of the tri-color LEDS through.  The battery pack and Hummingbird case hid nicely behind the chimney structure, and due to lack of time (and planning) on my part, the distance sensor just kinda snaked around the side.  

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At this point, I had programmed the servo to move the appropriate distance to make the feet wiggle, and make the LEDs light up red.  But what I really wanted was a “flickering fire” effect, so I quickly went and found someone way smarter than me to help program that part.  Luckily my colleague Erin is a genius, and she quickly whacked out some nice little code loops to get a very satisfying fire look.  

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The hard part was over!  Now it’s just a matter of finding a nice person who wants to warm their hands by the fire, and see what happens to Santa.  Is it a little sadistic?  Sure.  But it was a ton of fun to put it together, and I learned a lot!  

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Merry Christmas, and to all a good night!