Moo Moo Momentum

Moo Moo

Inspiration

We wanted to create a sense of community and interaction. A project that carries fun conversations that lead to an encouragement of interacting with others over the fun messages tailored to the Davis community or over positive words of encouragement. Essentially, a talking piece/conversation starter for people in Davis to find commonality in.

What it does

Users have the ability to move the art piece 180 degrees and view messages of positivity and humor.

How we built it

In terms of hardware, we used a Raspberry Pi, Arduino and a Servo to control the head of the cow. For the software side a webpage on the client’s computer would send commands to the Node.js server hosted on the Raspberry Pi. From there, these commands would be sent via UDP to the Python script which contained threads that sent these commands over Serial to the Arduino and collected data from the LiDAR respectively. From there, the Arduino would parse these commands and actuate the Servo to move a certain angle.

Challenges we ran into

Originally we were going to design an autonomous robot but realized that we wouldn’t have sufficient time to complete such an ambitious project. Then we pivoted to designing a rotating photo booth that could take selfies, but had issues with sending video streams over the network, and when we did the output was extremely laggy. Thus, we had to completely rethink our design from scratch after repeated failure.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

WE PUSHED THROUGH. After our initial concept didn’t pan out how we expected, we only had about 9 hours left to think, plan, and create an entirely new project. Thus, rather than giving up after that initial failure and calling it quits, we managed to create some kind of project that can be adapted into something better even though it was not what we originally planned.