Design

We went through brainstorming sessions to finalize on the snake robot technology to implement our ostrich neck, another idea was to use a series of strings connected to servos to manipulate the rise of fall of various points in the neck (team felt this was more complicated than the snake robot idea). For the outer casing that represents the ostrich body, we initially tried to use foam boards to cut layers to create a concave shell, but could not get the board to cut in proper shape. So for the next iteration used compressed wood board and laser cutter. We designed the body of ostrich such that the servo could be easily housed and created the shapes needed in Adobe illustrator and used Rabbit Laser cutter in ideate lab to cut the board. We resourced boards from wastage to cut our parts. For the iterations on the display modes of information, we initially decided to make the neck move up when the likes to dislikes ration increases and based on the necks position the led on the head of ostrich turns to a different color. Then we realised we can make it more interesting and can inform the user in a mild way with sounds from a piezo if there is a big jump on likes in the past hour.