Flappy Bird

This project spanned a number of years in various iterations. My favorite combines the mechanism of the bird with a custom iOS app that tracks the user's movement and flaps the bird when the user flaps.

This project started in 2017 with a cardboard prototype. My original idea was for it to fly across the room, but it didn't really work the way I wanted it to. It was hard to get enough vertical change for it to move smoothly.

I picked up my old prototype in the spring of 2019, and I made a wooden version. I first tested it by hand to ensure the flapping worked the way I wanted it to.

Then I used a large winch to pull the string to get enough movement of the string to make the bird flap.

I painted the bird's body and made felt feathers to decorate it.

The first version of the bird was programmed in MakeCode. The buttons on a micro:bit sent radio messages to the Hummingbird Bit to move the wings up and down.

After learning some app programming, I got inspired to revisit this project in the November 2021. I combined the Hummingbird Swift library with a Swift example demonstrating how to use CoreML to track body pose. The result is an iOS app that tracks the user's movement and uses it to control the bird. When both hands are above the shoulders, the bird's wings move to the up position. Otherwise, they move to the down position.