Naughty Andrew!! - Progress so far :)

Woooow... I have been neglecting my blog, sorry!!

So what's been happening? Well I shall fill you in..

Originally I was thinking of doing something that would be in hysterics. In looking at that I had thought of making some sort of creature - yep another one, it's what I do! and have it spin and/or throw its arms around. However, when asked to bring in some materials by Doug to begin making our robots, I ended up taking a trip to the Warehouse with Regan to see if I might find something in the toy section. So I did. On some sale shelf there was a dinosaur toy made by Playschool? I can't remember but it had a really nice movement to it. Operated by a button press, the toy would raise its head, snap its mouth while roaring and then after a bit of a delay would return to its rest state. Around the time of finding the dinosaur I had decided to make a plant creature as opposed to an animal as it was something I hadn't done before and we had been looking at plant behavior in class and especially after watching the plant video in class I got really inspired to make one of my own. The type of movement in the dinosaur toy made me think of a venus fly trap which has now become the basis of my project. At the moment I have been able to strip down the dinosaur - skinned it, detached its limbs, removed unwanted body features (eyes, horns) and Doug and Tiago have been giving me a lot of great help in rewiring its movement to act via the arduino board rather than the button. I have learnt a lot about transistors and how they work. Really interesting and a lot more fun to come I think so stay tuned, I will be updating this from now on!