Living Tentacle Soup

In the series "The Mandalorian" there is a scene in which a living tentacle soup is presented. To make my animatronic grogu in a suitable environment, I recreated the soup. Well - not quite as detailed as I usually do with the animatronic characters, but with a little more artistic freedom 😉.

Here is already a short video of the soup from the Maker Faire 2024 in Hanover:

The ingredients

To prepare a live tentacle soup, you need the following ingredients:

• 1x soup bowl (3D printed)
• 1x JGY370 geared motor forthemovementofthetentacles)
• 1x ultrasonic vaporizer so that the soup looks nice and hot
• 3x gears, for the tentacles (3D printed)
• Silicone for casting the tentacles
• Silicone Rubber Color for coloring the tentacles
• approx. 40cm brass wire 3mm
• Clear varnish for the surface of the soup
• A few M3 screws
• A few threaded inserts for the screws
• A small mini fan for the steam

Making-of videos

The soup is built completely live on Twitch. The streams are available as recordings on YouTube:

The structure

All models in this project (except for the individual tentacles) are 3D printed. All models except the tentacles are created with OpenSCAD. The tentacle shape comes from Thingiverse and was created by the artist ClayRade - Tentacles.

The tentacles

Unfortunately, I didn't get a 3D printed material that would be soft enough to make the tentacles out of. That's why I cast the tentacles from silicone with Shore hardness 10 . To do this, a tentacle is first printed normally with the 3D printer. This tentacle is then cast with impression silicone of hardness 20 to create a negative mold. The soft silicone can then be poured into this mold. The color of the tentacle can be determined by adding silicone rubber color when mixing the silicone. I used purple silicone here as a reference to the retro video game "Maniac Mansion - Day of the Tentacle".

Three of the six tentacles are static and do not move. The other three are hollow inside to accommodate a 3mm brass wire each. This cavity must be kept free by a cylindrical recess during casting, otherwise it will be difficult to get the wire into the tentacle later. Each wire simultaneously represents the axis of a gear wheel and can therefore rotate. Since the wire is bent in waves, it looks as if the tentacles are performing the tentacles and a kind of belly dance.

The mechanics + engine

The mechanics are quite simple: one of the three gears is driven by the motor. The other two are connected to the first one and thus rotate as well. To prevent the tentacles from moving too evenly, the gears have different sizes or numbers of teeth.

The soup

The soup consists of a 3D-printed, round disc into which the tentacles are glued. There is a hole in the disc under each tentacle through which the wire of the tentacles is passed. The disc is then screwed onto the engine and gears later. I painted the surface of the soup with clear varnish to make it look shiny and wet.

Fogger

The steam of the soup is generated by an ultrasonic evaporator. This creates a fine mist that makes the soup look hot - but is not hot but cold. Such nebulizers are known from humidifiers or aroma diffusers. The mist generated is then led away from the evaporator by a small mini fan and distributed around the edge of the soup.

The cloud chamber to distribute the steam around the edge of the soup:

First Impression

The soup is a nice little project that fits well into the world of Grogu.

At the Maker Faire 2024 in Hanover, it was a real eye-catcher and attracted many visitors. I was surprised that most visitors didn't realize how the movements of the tentacles work and instead found them very organic and alive.

There were even real tentacle fans among the visitors 😀 :