Birb

The last three things that needed to be completed to finish Dave up were as follows:

A nice box to perch on

A nice sign to know who he and his creators are

A snazzy coat of paint

1. The Box

2. The Sign

Made in Illustrator, and then cut onto a 1/4″ sheet of plywood

3. The Paint Job

Before we had the physical body of Dave to work on, the idea of how we were going to shape the wings around him remained a mystery. At first, we believed that spread wings would be more effective on his body...

...but no part of them worked. The folding was ridiculous for these wings, and once they were almost together, we realized that they wouldn't look right when folded down onto the body. So, back to the drawing board. 

This next wing folding in on itself, so we needed to figure out how to get it the shape we wanted. Thankfully, we had a little help from an exacto knife! In order to add stability to the wings, we glued a smaller piece of cardboard on the underside.

But then they wouldn’t always flap...

The most challenging part of putting together Dave’s wings was figuring out how to get them sturdy enough to not fall apart when he flaps, while keeping them light enough for the servo to lift them. It seemed like no matter what we did, they’d be too heavy to lift up! We then recut them from the thicker paper, instead of the mat board like we had been using. 

Everyone needs a good support system! Dave’s support system, his skeleton and legs/feet, went through several different iterations while he was being built. 

The picture down below is the first draft of Dave’s skeleton. From the top down, there was a bar for the head servo, the wings servo, another bar just for support, a bar that would help us add weight so he wasn’t top heavy, and a bar for a servo that would help him bounce (a mechanism we eventually scrapped). Ultimately, as Dave’s design changed, we decided that this version of the skeleton was unnecessarily big and heavy (it seems that birds have hollow bones for a reason). 

This is the second iteration of Dave’s skeleton. As you can see, he lost the bar dedicated to the head servo (we decided we didn’t need one for the time being), as well as several of his support bars and the one for the servo that would help him bounce. This version of the skeleton was much lighter, and it was what we used during Dave’s durability test. While it was lighter, parts of Dave were still too heavy for the servos that we had. We needed a way to reinforce the servos and provide more support for them while they worked, so we decided to make some more changes. 

This is the final iteration of Dave’s skeleton, which we laser cut out of 1/4′’ Baltic Birch Plywood. We ended up upgrading the size of Dave’s head and wings servos, meaning we needed to find new places for them to fit on the skeleton. The servos were held in place by pieces of laser cut wood glued to the skeleton, and they were screwed into the pieces of wood for extra support. The top bar on the right side of the skeleton was designated for the head servo, and the next bar was for the wings string that would get pulled down to the wings servo on the bar near the bottom. This iteration of Dave’s skeleton served us well, and allowed Dave to move and bounce while keeping his servos and inner mechanisms in place. 

Now to Dave’s feet and legs! Dave’s legs and feet are one of the main supports to his body. His legs didn’t go through many different iterations (early on we decided that they would be strong springs in order to help him bounce better). His feet however, were pretty difficult. 

The original design of his feet comes from a Pidgeot Pokemon 3D model created by Thingiverse user nitehack (https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:260738). We took the foot from the Pidgeot model, made minor adjustments in its shape, and then rescaled it to fit our bird. This model also has a hole towards the back of the foot, where we thought we would be able to put the spring in. The springs we ended up using were much too large for the hole however, so we had to make more adjustments.

While 3D printing this version of the foot, there were many failed prints that we couldn’t figure out the cause of. After a closer look at the model, we discovered that the bottom of the foot wasn’t completely flat. Using meshmixer’s plane cut feature, we flattened the bottom of the foot and were then successfully able to print it.  

This is the second and final iteration of Dave’s feet. Since the springs were so large, we decided that we would split the feet into two different parts to help them fit better. We used meshmixer to plane cut the feet into two parts, and then its modeling feature to make the part of the foot that connected to the leg more rounded. After his feet were printed, we used sandpaper and a Dremel to smooth them and give them a closer fit to the spring.  

The front part of the foot is pictured below.

The back talon of Dave’s foot. 

what cool guy is complete without some rockin shades? here’s how we got our bird to go from basic to iconic

Sunglasses pattern found on thingiverse - it was actually for eyeglasses, but I just erased the lines for lenses in acrobat.  Wanted to try laser cutting something with a living hinge.  Almost worked just as-is for Dave, but his head was bit too round for them, so the hinge snapped under the pressure of trying to make too wide of a bend

Bird Body model saved as stl from fusion - sent to meshmixer

reduced triangle budget in meshmixer to get the low poly look

took low poly look from meshmixer - dropped it into slicer, flattened it out

3d fusion model of bird

3d fusion model of skeleton with box

3d fusion model of skeleton with head

skeleton pieces laid out in fusion

how did dave stay together?

Bird shell - version 2 - polystyrene - shell too small for skeleton and doesn't leave room for the servos to move properly

First plan to make the mechanics of the bird accessible was to join together the back of the shell with velcro pieces.  This was not super successful - the velcro held but it didn't really lock the pieces together in a solid way    - also had to cut hole in base in order to get shell fitted onto legs

modeled in fusion- cut on 1/4″ ply

Main body shell of bird - modeled in fusion, reduced poly in meshmixer, dropped into slicer, laser cut out of polystyrene, puzzled back together with masking tape on the inside of the shell