Week 1 Update

We focused primarily on two things in order to create a strong foundation for the project: brainstorming and the proposal. Our theme of the project we all agreed to do is music. We began to form a couple of ideas on what our animatronic device should take shape of. Our thoughts went from creating a moving military drummer, at first, to a moving cat drummer because we felt the need to make our device more creative and appealing to youngsters. That was when we decided on the intent of this device to be solely for an entertainment use for little children. We were also inspired by a viral video of a cat found online. However, we then wanted to change the instrument used to a xylophone, so that the cat device could actually create a song and not a beat. We didn't want to betray the idea of having the cat moving its arms to drum (see Figure 1), and we were limited in creating a melodious song if we used the drum in comparison to the xylophone. This process of actually having the cat to playing a beautifully sounding song will be our testing process. So then, we discussed how we can make this cat-xylophone device have life like attributes for it to be an animatronic device. We concluded on three different coordinated movements: have the eyes blink, the ears move, and the arms move to play a song. Right after that, Robert asked our artist, "What should we name our cat, Gloria?" A light bulb went on in my head. One of the things I kept on the back on my head is what we should name our animatronic. It had to be good and catchy, I thought. We all agreed on the name, Gloria The Xylophone Playing Cat. Another question was raised and that was how can we actually create this animatronic. Is the creating process reasonable for us, Drexel freshman, or was it out of our reach? After researching (link found below) and analyzing the resources we have, we knew we could get this project completed in a ten week span.


Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kA_pbMR6jVs

Figure 1: Brainstorming ideas (e.g.  multiple motors for the arm)