The Iago Audio Animatronic is an animatronic parrot based on the iconic parrot, Iago, from the Disney movie Aladdin. The animatronic has capabilities of moving its mouth synchronously with a sound.

I have always been fascinated by animatronics since I was little. My love for animatronics started when I was stuck on Splash Mountain in Disney’s Magic Kingdom. My boat was positioned where I could see the inner workings of the animatronics. I was utterly amazed and I knew that I wanted to build one someday. The opportunity presented itself when I went to UAH and restarted the Everyday Engineering: Automations and Animatronics club. To gain interest in the club, I created Iago to bring to events to catch people’s eye.

I knew that for my first animatronic, I needed to do something to honor the first audio animatronic, a parrot for Walt Disney's Tiki Room. To continue the Disney theme, I decided to use audio of Iago from Walt Disney’s Aladdin.

Iago was brought to life using a parrot puppet for the exterior. The skeleton was designed using FreeCAD and 3D printed using PLA filament. The legs and the neck are adjustable and can be taken apart for ease of access for maintenance. Servo motors were used for the movement of the mouth.

I used the lighting software, Vixen, to sync the motor movements with the 10 different audio clips. I imported the Vixen files into Microsoft Visual Studio Code to communicate to a ESP32 Microcontroller.

Iago was brought to the UAH Registered Student Organization Fair to recruit students for the Everyday Engineering: Automation and Animatronics Club. Iago performed all 10 audio clips successfully at the fair and the club gained 23 new members.