Design Day is coming up faster than anticipated. This is crunch time! The team has made grea progress with each component in the hyena and now it is time to integrate them all together. The tail,ear and sound are soon to be installed in the hyena model and the head has made its first signs of working properly. The hyena head page has been created for you to see the first prototype. The Design Documentation Page has been created to hold all the files that our team creares for the ECE 480 course. This will be updated to contain all of the documents our team mades. The team's goal this week is to integrate as many sub-systems as we can into the robot. The graphical user interface is comoing along nicely. Stay tuned as soon we will add a page detailing the contorl of our robot. Our website has significant progress and is now viewable from the egr server. Plase check back frequencly to view our progress!
Our apologies for not having updated more frequently on progress! 2 weeks ago we finished our final design for the ear mechanism. A servo motor is coupled to a gear which pivots a U-shaped piece of metal. The metal will protrude from the head and have 2 ears that resemble a hyena's attached and will move forward and backward to show the hyenas body language. (Aggressive or submissive)
The hyena tail has significant progress to report as well. The disks which make up the structure of the tail have been printed and assembled to form the tail. Thin metal wiring has been strung through holes in the disks and a thicker wire provides support through the center. The tail can bend both up and down much like the tail of a hyena. The wires that run along the outside of the disks can be connected to a servo motor to create tension and bend the tail. The final working design is not completed but we anticipate completion soon.
The control system of the robot is also making significant progress. The Xbee wireless module is fully functioning and we are able to send commands to our microcontroller from a distance without connection. The User Interface is in it's infancy but we have buttons which can control motors to different positions and buttons which control sound.
The sound control and hardware of the hyena is completed with the exception of a speaker which is soon to be selected and ordered. As stated above the user interface has 3 buttons which can play sounds that a hyena makes.(giggle, whoop, and mooing)
We have hollowed out a majority of the hyena model to allow us to place our ear mechanism in the head and place our electrical components in the body and tail.
Overall we are very happy with our progress and anticipate making our deadlines.
posted Feb 6, 2012 7:36 PM by Eric Mitchell [updated Feb 6, 2012 7:36 PM]
Today our team moved a mounted hyena from the MSU museum to the Kresge Art Center to be 3D scanned. The scans are to be used with the 3D printer in the engineering building to reconstruct the realism of an actual hyena. The current plan of action is to print the ears and possibly the head, to resemble the most important part of the hyena.
posted Jan 13, 2012 9:35 AM by Eric Mitchell [updated Feb 20, 2012 3:27 PM]
This website has been created to organize and highlight the hyena robot team's accomplishments. This site is will grow as our team makes progress towards achieving our design goals.
