It’s getting spooky in the Nuclear Science Building… and not just because our Preliminary Design Review is due this week!

We’re hard at work collating and distilling our notes from our visit to Pinecrest Gardens into a neat package called the Preliminary Design Review (PDR). Using our new guidance from Pinecrest, along with the materials we assembled into our PDR presentation, Parrotronix is compiling a year-to-date written summary of our research, prototype expectations, and design work. It’s not a light read— 54 pages, to be exact! It’s a representation of our team’s collective effort thus far, and also serves as an important milestone and contract in our relationship with Pinecrest Gardens. Once this step in our process is complete, it’s time to step into high gear; Prototype Inspection Day is less than two weeks away!

This week, our team continues working day and night on compiling our Preliminary Design Report. Previously, we’ve been focusing on subsystem mechanics and feasibility research, but as we get closer to our site visit date with our sponsors, we’re also shifting our focus to the system as a whole; ensuring all of our subsystems not only are reliable, but that they are interoperable and fully compatible. If it isn’t clear by now, the most challenging part of our project isn’t a component or system itself, but rather the engineering required to integrate all of our subsystems together, at the same time, occupying the same space-limited area.

On a more fun note, we’ve also received a special package from the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering department! A crate full of electric motors and linear actuators for us to browse, test, and potentially use in our prototypes. We’re still just getting started with our initial prototypes, but things are starting to accelerate in our lab!

This week, Parrotronix continued work on our Preliminary Design Review. As part of our review, we’re looking to narrow down the requirements and specifications of our project, coordinating with Pinecrest Gardens. We’re hard at work expanding on our initial concept design, and preparing to share our progress with other IPPD groups for feedback.

We’ve also started getting hands-on with our prototype! We’re kicking it off with electronics work, gathering microcontrollers, single-board computers, and a plethora of peripherals to begin experimenting and refining our control systems. Soon, we’ll also start building some physical mockups of our feathered friends using materials from the IPPD laboratories.

This week, a number of important IPPD events took place. We attended professional development workshops from FPL and NextEra Energy, a training on Lean Six Sigma process design and improvement. Later in the week, we also heard from the University of Florida’s own Dr. Tinker from Engineering Entrepreneurship. He gave a talk about project-level elevator pitches and methods for effective engineering communication across different audiences.

As a team, Parrotronix worked together to draft our first monthly report, as well as further developing our concept designs for each of the subsystems of our birds. We spoke with David Mendez from Pinecrest, further refining the exact needs and requirements of our project compared to what Pinecrest Gardens is expecting. As we make our way through our list of subsystems, we’re discovering new approaches to the mechanical and electrical aspects of each movement and interface.

This week, Parrotronix huddled around our whiteboards and started brainstorming the electrical, mechanical, and computer engineering aspects of our bird friends. You read that right: we couldn’t fit all of our ideas on just one whiteboard!

We’re excited to continue working out the details of our project with our liaison engineer and coach, but this is just the beginning. We’ve been further developing our project documentation, and we are starting to gather sources for materials, create concept drawings, and manage system diagrams. We’re still in the early stages, but we’re already investigating possible mechanical systems and the electrical architecture of the installation. Once we develop a more detailed plan with the help of our liaison engineer, it’s full steam ahead for Parrotronix.

This week, our team finalized our branding… meet Parrotronix!

We also met with our coach, Kimberly Stubbs. She is a PhD candidate at the University of Florida, working on human-robot interaction and rehabilitative robotics with the Nonlinear Controls and Robotics group. She is also an IPPD alumni! We discussed the scope of our project, the needs of our sponsor, and created guidelines for efficient communication throughout the rest of our program.

Finally, our group made significant progress on our project’s documentation. We’ve created and filled out the beginning of some living documents, including our Scope of Work and Technical Design Specifications. We gained a deeper understanding of our customer’s needs, and developed a draft of our projects requirements, specifications, and success factors.

Thanks for checking out our blog!

Now that our team has officially been formed, we would like to introduce ourselves! IPPD Team 13 will be working with Pinecrest Gardens to design, prototype, and produce a pair of interactive animatronic parrots. We have seven team members:

• Ambar Aballo Ruiz, ME
• Amanda Perrone, ME
• Corbin Weir, CpE
• Jake Blumberg, EE
• Joseph Bongiorno, ME
• Matthew Shoemaker, EE
• Nunnapas Temridiwong, CpE

We will be working alongside our coach, PhD candidate Kimberly Stubbs, as well as our Liaison Engineers from The Village of Pinecrest: David Mendez, P.E. and Leo Llamas. On this blog, we will be publishing weekly updates on our project and giving insight into our design process. We are so excited to get started!