Just eight short months ago, our team had just met each other for the first time, eager to get started on this epic project. Little did we realize what we were getting ourselves into, nor how fast time would fly.

As of this week, IPPD has officially concluded, and we wouldn’t trade it for anything. Our project with Pinecrest Gardens has been an incredible experience, and we are extremely proud of our current product. While we can’t say for sure when you’ll be able to meet Pinky and Mac for yourselves, we plan to visit Pinecrest to complete final installation of the animated exhibit in early May. Until then, we’ve included a copy of our project video and digital poster below. Thank you for following our journey!

If there’s one thing we’ve learned over the past 4 years, it’s that face-to-face meetings are usually better than online meetings. Luckily for us, our Liaison engineer David Mendez paid a visit to UF this week and dropped by the Parrotronix Lab! We were so excited to show him around our workspace, as well as the cool engineering and prototyping facilities we have access to as students across campus.

We also made some significant progress on our scenic details. Thanks to some creative help from our IPPD lab manager, we were able to use an empty laboratory space in our building for mixing, applying, and hand-sculpting our epoxy putty finish. Our team is using the same materials and techniques used in major theme parks across the world, and we think it turned out amazing! It’s not a simple or fast process, but it will ensure that this exhibit stays beautiful for years to come regardless of weather or maintenance. Feel free to take a look at our timelapse video below.

As we get closer and closer to our Final Design Review, we’re also nearing the end of the semester, graduation (for some team members)… and most importantly, our installation date! With no time to lose, members of our team have been hard at work assembling and manufacturing the parts for our final assembly. The design work has long since finished, and assembly is the home stretch!

Three of our team members are in the mechanical engineering program at UF, which means they’re already certified to work in the Design and Manufacturing Laboratory (and other safety-critical manufacturing facilities on campus). Our durability-focused design calls for a lot of interesting manufacturing techniques: not just drill presses and band saws, but also lathes, waterjet, CNC milling, and more!

This week in Parrotronix, we participated in IPPD’s Prototype Inspection Day! This is a private event where our project’s final prototype is put on display for expert faculty from all around UF to observe and critique as we enter our final weeks of validation and manufacturing. While it took a lot of effort to get to this point, it certainly paid off!

In fact, we unintentionally stole the show! Our animated figures, combined with their professional voice acting, drew a crowd of spectators and judges from around the room… even during one of our official judging timeslots! IPPD staff almost had to pull people away from our captivating display to keep the event running smoothly. As a team, we are incredibly proud of the work we’ve been able to show off, combining the best of our mechanical, electrical, and computer engineering skills in one assembly. Soon enough, the artistic and scenic aspects will come together too, and then these two birds might just be the real center of attention. With less than a month to go before the end of the semester, expect to see some more photos here soon!

The Parrotronix team has surpassed a month of non-stop acceleration since our two Qualification Review Board events earlier in the semester. But just because things are going well doesn’t mean we aren’t starting to get nervous around here! While we’ve been busy machining and 3D printing, we’ve also been aware of a looming deadline: IPPD’s Prototype Inspection Day is next week!

We’ll be putting on a good show, with both of our featherless friends on display for expert faculty from all around UF to observe! While we won’t have all of our scenic elements ready in time, we see this as a positive: We want to hear from the invited guests all they have to say about our mechanical design and our manufacturing as it stands. Unfortunately, images of our in-production birds aren’t ready at the time of this blog post, but we’re very excited to share our birds first public debut in the coming days!

Don’t worry, we didn’t work during all of UF’s official spring break! But that doesn’t mean Parrotronix was slacking off either. A huge part of our progress over the last two weeks has been preparing as many components for manufacturing ahead of our team’s full return to campus after the break. This includes our motors, mounting blocks, fasteners, and the largest subsystem of the animated figures themselves: Their shells!

Now, parrots don’t usually have shells, but they also aren’t usually filled with wiring, linkages, and servo motors! In order to create a cohesive look for each of our figures, we took time over break to do some Spring Cleaning of our 3D models, including digitally sculpting our birds. Our team has been working in Blender, an extremely powerful and free 3D mesh software that is widely used in the entertainment industry. Using the sculpting and mesh editing tools, we can artistically shape our birds while ensuring all of the critical mechanical systems are contained properly. This is also the step where we add cuts to allow for the large range of motion in the figure, as well as mechanical connections to the skeleton of each figure. Once these parts are printed, our scenic team will follow up by preparing a fabric pattern for each section, with help from some of Blender’s built in texturing tools.

Our team is still hard at work refining and manufacturing our final product this week. If you have been following along our blog posts, you’ve seen that our team has been inspired and empowered to push through our tasks as efficiently as possible. Because of this, we’ve had so many advancements that we won’t be able to detail them all in just one blog post!

To start, our computer team has been working on refining their algorithms and improving our automatic speech and phoneme detection to allow for easy updates after this project exits development. The mechanical team has been focusing on our sheet metal fabrication, as we’ll need access to some of the advanced machinery available at the Herbert Wertheim Laboratory for Engineering Excellence’s Open Prototyping Lab (or, the HWLEE OPL… but that isn’t much easier to say, is it?), including an OMAX Abrasive Waterjet. Our electrical team has also been coordinating the wiring harnesses for each of the birds and their internal components, while also taking the time to ensure all of our components are weatherproof and certified to the highest standards for reliability, especially in extreme heat and humidity. And with all of that being said, we can’t wait to share even more progress in two weeks after a restorative Spring “break”!

This week, our team hit another major milestone: We’ve begun final manufacturing for our project deliverables! In other words, we’re well on our way to meeting our feathered friends!

We also just finished up consulting with a panel of IPPD faculty during our second Qualification Review Board. Like we anticipated last week, we presented the significant increase in productivity and overall progress that our team has made since the previous event, and the panel also provided valuable feedback on how we can maintain an sustain this level of production. As the semester heats up and members start dealing with other exams and college to-dos, we’re still pushing ahead to deliver a great product. With all of the positive results from the last week, we’re finding some much needed optimism here at Parrotronix!

A huge amount of engineering progress has been made in the last week, breaking a record for our entire team in action-items solved. The mechanical team completed their integrated model and made significant progress on CAD drawings for final manufacturing. Their work was combined with the computer team’s most recent updates, and we also started work on our weather resistance testing. Phew!

As our team gears up for our second Qualification Review Board next week, we’re focusing on testing. That means waterproofing, durability testing, and a huge range of qualitative tests as well. To start, we’ve been testing the durability of many materials in our project to ensure they are meeting design specifications. For instance, the ABS and ASA materials used for our 3D printed parts, the urethane resin used to coat them, and the faux fur fabric that will be sewn over top of the entire assembly. Each of these materials plays an important role. Both the 3D printed materials and their resin coatings passed our tests with flying colors.

Speaking of flying colors… while our birds might not fly, they need to look fly! Before and after treating our fabrics with a hydrophobic coating from 3M, we evaluated the appearance, UV resistance, and waterproofing qualities of each sample. This was one of our most surprising test results; the coated fabric materials were significantly more waterproof than expected, which is great news for ensuring a long lifetime for these animated figures. We are excited to see such rapid testing and progress and can’t wait to showcase our strides in staying on-track with our next Qualification Review Board.

Who doesn’t love arts and crafts? This week’s blog post is a long-overdue update from our scenic team! We’ve recently received the materials and tools required to give our parrots a perch to call home. And not just any home, a sculpted masterpiece at that!

Well, we can’t argue that any of us are master sculptors, but some members of our team have learned from some of the best in the industry when it comes to scenic finishes and delicate details. Starting from the bottom, our bird perch will be resting on a rolling base, complete with a detailed fiberglass rock. Crucially, the entire structure has been designed to fit through the existing openings of the historic cage at Pinecrest Gardens. Peeking out of the rock are two rigid PVC pipes, but they will soon be covered in a detailed epoxy putty sculpt to emulate the trees and man-made perches these birds used to actually sit on when our venue was known as Parrot Jungle.

This process includes some quite messy components, from putty to powder, and silicone too! The result is a realistic tree branch that serves as the main structure for our animated figures. Not only is the final result incredibly lifelike, but it’s also being manufactured using the exact same method and materials as in major theme parks around the world. It’s going to look great!