Day 4.5: Continuing With Wings On Friday

   After we were done with our bottle opener presentation on Friday, we started working on our " Bird Wings". We had been introduced to PicoCricket and different motions that can be achieved with Legos earlier. I still couldn't see how these movements could be translated to flapping. My partner Marie and I decided to look at the different gear mechanisms in the 507 Mechanical Movements for inspiration. Then, this little mechanism drew our attention:

   It was simple and straightforward; you turn a handle, a rod goes up. We started to think how we can connect the wings and attach this mechanism to make the wings move. We counted on gravity to bring the wings back down. Here is a sketch I drew:

Here are Marie's sketches:

    Both of these ideas are based on the assumption that the two wings will be connected and one rod will be moving their connection point. On the left, they are linked by a middle piece loosely and the middle piece is attached to the end of the moving rod. On the right, they are connected to each other and the rod hits their connection point directly. Another idea we explored -but that isn't represented by the sketches because we weren't able to decipher each other's sketches easily and started to show with Legos- was having two separate rods, attached each to one wing.We presented our sketches to the class and started working on two Lego models. By the end of the day, we had one working model that we used to compare one versus two rod mechanisms. We decided to meet up outside class to build a second model. Here is the result:

We used a conveyor belt to achieve motion but it's questionable to what degree it would actually look like flapping. We decided to see what Lyn thinks about it.