Enchanted Tiki Room Diorama

I toyed around with the idea of building some sort of representation of the Enchanted Tiki Room for about four months before I finally decided to move forward with detailed planning of the project. I knew I wanted to use an Arduino micro-controller to control the show, and I knew that I could find a number of nice 1:12 scale miniature birds on eBay. That was the basis for the project. I spent three weeks drawing up all the plans for the diorama and testing all the individual electronic components. I had my grandmother paint all of the detailed murals, and I enlisted my girlfriend to help with all of the tiki totems.

I framed the show building out of balsa wood, and the roof was built as one complete assembly to allow easy access to the model until it was finished.

interior walls were all covered in fabric that matched the texture of the walls of the actual show.







The window effects were created by sizing and cropping images of tropical islands. I ordered a dozen miniature palm trees and cut them to size to fit within the window shadow boxes. A blue LED was then placed in a corner of the shadow box to create the effect of night.


The ground was made by cutting tile shapes out of an egg carton, the tiles were then painted, the cracks were then filled with glue and painting a concrete color.

The center piece was made out of tiki necklace pendants, then decorated with flowers.

I drilled a hole through the base board so that a diffuser could be placed under the diorama to give the effect of fog.

All of the flowers and plants were purchased individually from eBay and Etsy, and then brought together to form all the floral elements of the show



The bird perches were built out of toothpicks and cocktail umbrellas. The circular perches were built out of evergreen plastic rods.



The show was programmed with an Arduino Mega, and an Arduino Uno was used to run the RGB LED lights. Four servo motors were used for each of the main host birds. The Chorus birds were all geared together to be controlled by two Lego Power Functions motors. I used Woodland Scenics just plug light system to control the main house lights of the show.



The show program consists of seven hundred lines of code, mainly consisting of for loops for the control of the servo motors.The audio was all set up on a playlist on my iPhone, and the show was started via remote control based off of specific audio queues.

This project could not have happened without the work of my girlfriend, who painted all the detailed tiki heads, and my grandmother, who painted all the intricate murals in the show.