Meeting Time
Thursday 5pm – Poly
Project Description
Our project consists of creating a better option for feeding an African Spurred Tortoise named Flower. After she was neglected and abused by her previous owners her shell collapsed causing her to lose mobility in her neck. Unfortunately, this has caused her to be put on an experiment/one of a kind back brace. All of this has led to Flower not being able to feed herself via grazing. This makes her in need of assistance to be fed since her neck is only able to stretch straight up and slightly up but not down to pick her food off the ground.
The proposed solution at the moment is to create an automatic or semi automatic feeder that will allow Flower to eat comfortably with her disability and allow her handlers to not spend so much time with feeding. One proposed solution, will be an automatic feeder that has a rotation system so that it can push out food at mouth level for Flower, our hope is to make it solar powered. Although, the handlers do have wired power to each tortoise pen so a wired device will work too. The approach we will take, will be to study Flowers’ eating habits and her capabilities. After analyzing this data we will take the necessary measurements for her range of motion and solidify an optimal solution. To date, there has not been any work done; our team will be the first to take on this challenge.