Week 4 Update

During this week, two songs was hardcoded through Arduino: Mary Had A Little Lamb and a song completely created by our musician. This task was supposed to be the testing phase, but since our musician is also the group's coder (strong in both areas), the testing phase which was planned to be a span of three weeks was cut down to one. Because of how fast this task was completed, it cannot be considered the testing phase anymore. That was when we decided to change our route from having a testing phase to making our project aesthetically pleasing. The quickness of this completion also made the group think about more ideas, such as adding a button for different songs being played and putting lights around the xylophone. In the previous week, the challenge was how to successfully connect two motors together. When the small motors were delivered, it just so happened that hot gluing them together was not needed because rubber bands were enough to tightly hold them in place. However, this does not mean we will not glue them together during the final phase of the project. As a backup, a 3D CAD model was drawn through SolidWorks if the group wanted to go through he 3D approach (see Figure 1). Along with that, effort was made to 3D model the body of the cat, so that it can be 3D printed for aesthetics. However, that idea was soon discarded because of none of the group members had enough experience with SolidWorks to make the body actually visually appealing (see Figure 2). We looked through Amazon and found a realistic cat hand puppet (see Figure 3). This would be perfect because we put all the intricate parts (breadboard, wires, etc.) in the cat puppet, normally where a hand would go. The link to buy it can be found below.

Click here to buy the cat puppet

Figure 1:

Figure 2:

Figure 3: