Dave the God of Jams

Link to full development log - https://birdbrainedbot.tumblr.com/

I would heavily suggest checking out the tumblr blog linked above before continuing, since it has more specific information and details the process of everyone involved. I'll be talking more about the process in general here, and showcasing more of the final product. But the blog linked above has everyone's contributions as well as diagrams and other cool info if that's up your alley and/or you're curious as to how something like a dancing bird gets created.

Here's a video of the final product being showcased at the Austin Maker Faire. The audio is rather soft, but the bird is playing about 30 seconds of the hit Bruno Mars song "Uptown Funk."

When we set out to create this bird, we were inspired by videos of cockatoo's dancing to Elvis music, and felt that it would fit the theme of Interactive Zoo that had been given to us. The goals were to create a bird that would start dancing with the beat of music, and to craft and experience for the children attending. None of us had worked on a full animatronic before, though we all had some sort of experience with our respective parts. I worked on the electronic side of things, coding the audio/button interactions as well as physically wiring the bird and all of its motors. My partner and I went through many different iterations of what the dance should look like, what parts of him would move and how they would move. The original design ended up being scaled back a lot, not because we couldn't accomplish it, but because it lost the appeal of a intentionally dancing bird and became more of an uncoordinated mess.

an early mock up

Neither my partner nor I are electrical engineers, and while we easily figured out the code, the wiring sometimes eluded us. More than once an issue was simply because the breadboards we were using weren't up for the task of driving this bird or because we wired something backwards. However, in the end the only issue we had was the occasional 'servos stopped working' and needed to be reset. We even made the box he perched on able to be opened in order to address this issue. The worst part of the process was the time I accidentally laid down on an active hot glue gun and burned a section of my forearm. Primarily I worked with Arduino Uno's, servos, wires, breadboards, and a variety of sensors throughout the process (exact sensors are mentioned in the aforementioned tumblr blog). The whole experience was extremely enlightening, and took my knowledge of coding into a more physical environment.

This bot encountered hundreds of visitors over the course of the faire, and was one of the few to make it out still functional. Many others had their sensors destroyed, or parts of the animatronics would fall apart/be messed with by the children present. Dave holds a special place in my heart, as he was the first time I had gotten back into robotics since high school. We worked hard on him, and our hard work paid off in the end. In fact, Dave is featured on the front page of the Texas Applied Arts page, under the "Digital Fabrication" tab in the "Past Courses" feature as well in the feature video on the homepage (https://sites.utexas.edu/appliedarts/) .