It took a lot of tweaking to get the mechanisms working right, but most of the are properly set up now and ready to animate.
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Impressive !!!
The light bulb needs more attention in texture / material.
That’s as bright as I could get it in cycles and even then I had to add a point light over top of it for the right effect. Any tips on how to increase emission / bloom in cycles?
What a unique, awesome design! How did you do the spring animation?
Lots of trial an error.
Ultimately all of the joint bones are pointing at the same reference bone way below them.
To shrink the cage they all move towards it in a cone shape along their local Y axis, and then the whole structure is brought back up the same amount on the global Z axis.
To expand it I just key frame the animation in reverse.
You have to play with the numbers a bit to keep the same relative distance between them, but once it’s done you can anchor anything to the main structure.
Thanks for asking! 
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