Animatronic Hand
Laser-cut birch plywood hand with five SG90s, Spectra tendons, and PWM calibration. A complete animatronics apprenticeship that finishes as a keepable desk demo.
Catalog · 31 packs · all available now
Project packs
Thirty-one hands-on & high-quality engineering packs—laser-cut birch plywood, honest BOMs, first-principles lessons. All 31 are available now as digital downloads—or get the full library plus a 16-week semester path with Build Club Curriculum ($9/mo founder). Classroom Hand is $59 for 1 educator, up to 10 learners.
Desk Animatronic Graduate
Capstone desk robot: birch torso combining a servo face with one or two five-digit hands. Graduates builders who finished Hand / Servo Face / Mascot Head. Coordinated multi-servo demo.
IR Tripwire Doorbell
IR LED and phototransistor on birch mounts (bench ≤ 15 cm), upgradable to a 38 kHz TSOP38238 doorway beam (> 3 m). Break the beam—buzzer fires. Teach infrared, noise, and threshold detection without mystery modules.
Birch Differential Rover
Laser-cut birch chassis with TT or N20 motors, H-bridge, and differential drive. Learn torque, turning radius, and battery safety on a keepable plywood rover.
Piano Circuit Machine
Birch key bed with eight tactile switches driving piezo tones. Frequency, pitch math, and switch circuits in one weekend build.
Homeschool STEM Week
Five linked daily mini labs—levers, circuits, IR sensing, gearing, synthesis—with a parent guide. Birch structure and real electronics where it matters.
Servo Expression Face
Laser-cut birch face plate with 3–5 SG90s for brows, eyes, and jaw. Program expression presets via PWM—a desk animatronics conversation piece.
Pneumatic Soft Gripper
Syringe-driven pneumatic gripper on a birch mount with optional soft tips. Teach Pascal’s principle, force, and soft robotics with an honest BOM.
Light-Following Robot
Braitenberg-style light seeker on a birch chassis with LDR pair—differential drive or servo pan. Photocurrent, ADC, and seek vs flee coupling.
Bridge Load Lab
Laser-cut birch truss and girder spans with a predicted-first, water-bucket load protocol over a padded catch tray. Trace force paths until failure modes appear.
Weather Station
Desk weather station in a birch enclosure: DHT22 or BME280, OLED/LCD display, and serial CSV logging. Sense, display, log—keep the instrument.
Line-Following Rover
Birch differential chassis with IR reflectance sensors and dual geared motors. Tune bang-bang vs proportional steering on a keepable plywood rover.
Ultrasonic Rangefinder Lab
HC-SR04 on a birch stand with parking-sensor alerts and live distance display. Time-of-flight, speed of sound, and beam failure modes.
Solar Tracker
Quadrant-LDR 1–2 axis birch gimbal with SG90 pan/tilt toward brighter sky. Cosine losses, hysteresis, and optional PV voltage logging.
Gear Ratio Lab
Laser-cut birch gear train with measurable torque/speed tradeoff. Count teeth, compute ratio, lift a known mass—ideal math vs friction reality.
Gyro Leveling Platform
Self-leveling birch tray with MPU6050 IMU and dual servos. Pitch/roll sensing closed-loop to keep a payload level—intro to feedback control.
3-DOF Plywood Arm
Laser-cut birch robot arm with 3× micro servos: base yaw, shoulder and elbow pitch. Forward kinematics demo and simple geometric IK intro.
Ballista Physics Lab
Birch ballista for measured angle-vs-range experiments with soft projectiles only. Projectile motion, energy storage, and honest lab data.
Bernoulli Wind Lab
Laser-cut venturi and airfoil demos with a USB fan and manometer or paper-lift. Continuity, Bernoulli, and honest caveats about real airfoils.
Capacitive Touch Synth
Birch-panel touch synthesizer with copper-foil capacitive pads driving Arduino tones (or classic 555 path). Capacitance, RC sensing, and pitch.
POV LED Spinner
Two-sided birch POV spinner in a closed enclosure with Hall-synced LED columns. Persistence of vision, timing vs RPM, and rotational balance on a keepable plywood rotor.
Electromagnet Lab
Nail electromagnet with a logic-level MOSFET driver on a birch fixture for measured lift tests. Amp-turns, flyback diodes, and honest paperclip counts.
Animatronic Mascot Head
Original Laue Labs birch mascot head with 2–3 servos for jaw and eyes. Family-friendly desk animatronic—original character, not licensed IP.
Diffraction Spectroscope
Birch tube spectroscope with CD grating, razor slit, and fluorescent-line wavelength calibration — Max von Laue’s diffraction, on the desk.
Cam-Follower Engine
Swappable birch plate cams (eccentric, heart, dwell, plus a square “bad example”) with spring-return follower and crank — profile to motion, measured.
Desk Load-Cell Scale
HX711 load-cell desk scale on a birch platform — tare, calibrate with known masses, and treat mounting as metrology.
Tilt Maze Labyrinth
Dual-servo birch tilt maze with joystick or serial control — gravity as the plant, play as the enemy.
Strain-Gauge Beam Lab
Clamped birch cantilever: hang masses, measure tip deflection, get Young’s modulus from the slope. Optional HX711 load-cell force check.
Binary Logic Gates Board
Birch breadboard-style faceplate with discrete switches and LEDs teaching AND, OR, and NOT — optional Arduino truth-table checker.
Stepper Clock Escapement
Birch clock face with 28BYJ-48 / ULN2003 driving a minute hand — timing, gearing, and open-loop step accuracy.
Color-Sort Chute
TCS34725 color sensor and SG90 divert flaps on a birch chute — sensing thresholds meet a sorting mechanism.
Classroom
Teaching a group?
Animatronic Hand Classroom license $59 — 1 educator, up to 10 learners (digital files + license). Hardware still separate (~$42–148 per station). Pay on the shop or request an invoice.
Classroom $59 Pay by invoiceWant the materials too? Full build materials at cost + 10%. Reply with the pack and the number of students or teams for an itemized quote.
For schools, co-ops & microschools
These packs are also a full curriculum
Every project above appears in our licensed courses: a 30-week elementary-to-middle-school program and a 1-credit high-school semester — with student workbooks and a week-by-week teacher's guide mapped to NGSS standards.
Curriculum A — 30 weeks, ages 8–14. Physics, circuits, sensing, robotics, animatronics finale.
Curriculum B — 1 credit, grades 9–12. 120-hour lab semester with a rocket flight-computer capstone.