KineMachina Talos
Show control for animatronic scenes. Talos is the console that runs a KineMachina show: you place the creatures, speakers, lights and sensors in sets, choreograph scenes on a multi-track timeline, and wire cues so a sensor trip plays the right scene at the right moment. Then you rehearse the whole thing from the couch and run it live with a PANIC button within reach. The first production is a Halloween haunt — a walkway sensor trips a cue, MechaGodzilla growls and glances at the visitor, and on the next trip lunges and roars a line from a pool it never repeats — but nothing in Talos is Halloween-specific.
Show Night
How a Show Runs
A show is one production: its sets, its cues, and the scenes they play. A set is a place — the porch, the graveyard — and the elements standing in it: an animatronic, a pair of speakers, a light, a walkway sensor. Every device on the bus announces what it can do, so readiness is never a guess. If a robot is offline or a speaker is switched off, the show page names the exact complaint before anyone arrives.
Scenes are the choreography. Each one is a timeline with a lane per output — motion, lights, audio, video — where poses, motions, clips and spoken lines snap to a 100 millisecond grid. Trim a clip, slip it, mute a lane, and audition the whole scene against a virtual twin when the real robot is switched off or across the room. A scene can take parameters, so one lunge-and-roar scene speaks whichever line the cue hands it.
Cues connect the world to the scenes. A cue watches one event from one device, checks its time window, its cooldown and its lock, then plays the scene on the current rung of its escalation ladder: growl first, lunge on the next visitor, with spoken lines drawn from a pool that never repeats. Rehearse fires the cue for real from the console; trace runs the same decision without moving anything. Every cue has its own arm and disarm.
Live mode is the show floor: arm everything, watch the activity feed as sensors trip and scenes play, drop a scene onto a set by hand, and if anything goes wrong, PANIC halts every device on the bus and disarms every cue with a single press and no confirmation dialog.
Shows & Sets
One show per production. Sets place your elements on stage and show, device by device, whether the show is ready to run — and exactly what is wrong when it isn't.
Scenes Timeline
A lane per output, clips that snap, trim and slip, a live play-head with transport controls, and audition against a virtual twin when the hardware is off.
Cues & Rehearsal
Sensor events become scene plays through time windows, cooldowns, locks and escalation ladders. Rehearse for real or trace dry, and arm or disarm any cue in one click.
Devices & PANIC
Every device advertises its own controls, so the console builds a panel for anything on the bus — including a browser tab acting as a speaker or a screen. PANIC stops it all.
Under the Hood
Four Processes, One Bus
Talos is four small processes talking over one MQTT bus. The hub is the system of record: it keeps shows, sets, scenes and cues in SQLite, serves the console, and renders spoken lines with Piper. The devices process hosts everything that isn't its own robot — speakers and lights through Home Assistant, screens, sensors, and virtual twins. The cue engine only decides. The dispatcher only plays scenes, and it owns halt. Every device on the bus, firmware or hosted, speaks the same protocol — KRP — and publishes a manifest of what it can do, so a new robot shows up in the console with its controls already drawn. Because each process has one job, a mid-show restart of any one of them never touches the others, and spoken lines are rendered ahead of time so a cue never waits on the text-to-speech engine.
Want Talos Running Your Show?
Tell us about your production — a haunt, a display, a recital, a robot battle — and we'll talk through what it would take.