Our design is based off the idea that every girl wanted to be a princess with fairy wings sometime in their childhood. And with this project, we want to give them this experience. By making these wings that you can control as you like,  it gives young girls the opportunity to enjoy their childhood to the fullest.

This project is quite simple. We've created a mechanism that is made of several wooden sticks conjoined at certain angles and positions that allows you to extend and contract the length of the wings at will. This contraption allows us to change the shape of the wings by only moving a singular piece.

1st Iteration: Cardboard linkage mechanism test:

Our first Iteration was made of cardboard, we just wanted to test out what were some possible positions for how we should place the cardboard pieces so that we could extend the wings and make sure it is flexible and operational. From the first draft; we notice that the wings cannot extend very well and always gets stuck. Therefore, we need the specific measurement of the length and the angles. Although we did not get into the right spot on our first try, the way that we put the sticks together gave us ideas to make it better.

1.5 Iteration: Thin Wood - improved rod shape (skeletal) Improved mechanism

After we figured out the specific measurement; we decided to use thin wood for testing if it’s going to work in when we use a harder material, such as t. During this time we got the numbers, harder wood sticks, and screws. We made it works a lot better, compare to the previous one. The wings can flap well and it is stable, but one things we still want a little bit is that the wings were lack of moving rotationally. In order to make the wings flap around ; we used 3D printer to print a ball joint so that it would move around.

2nd Iteration: Thick wood - wing tip shape, back panel + harness

We also tried using thick wood for making the sticks stable, because we thought maybe it would be stronger and easier to use. At first,we just made one part of the wings with the thick wood to support the other heavy wood, but it was hard to operate properly, because the joints were really firm and would not slide smoothly. We tried several different ways of working with the thick wood, including adding another piece to the structure. But that didn’t really help and we gave up attempting to use the thick wood to make our final design. Because of this, we decided to change the wood back to something that would be easy to move.

Diagrams/ Final Pictures

3rd/Final: Thin wood w/ improved back panel + foot cuff

In the end, we decided to that our original idea was the best. Due to the failure with the thick wood, thin wood looked as if it was the best material for us to use in the final design. After looking at our earlier iteration, we thought of what we could improve by changing the shape. We also changed the back panel, into a better one, that looks better, and allows the wings to perform better. We also created a foot cuff, so that we could attach the string to it and allow us to operate the extention of the wings with our feet. That ended up working really well, and we improved it to what it looks like today.