Reflections

We have each written about our own individual experience during this project.

Nathan:

I felt as though the hardest part of this project was maintaining consistent cable management and connection throughout the construction and testing of the project. The coding and circuits themselves were straightforward and simplistic. I learned that utilizing jumper cables is convenient in circuit construction, but messy and easy to disconnect. In the future I would prefer to solder or use properly length cut wires in order to preserve the integrity of the circuits so that they could function under a range of circumstances. How we interpreted the data could have made the project function very differently, for instance, we could have taken the change in velocity as input from the IR and used that to light the LED, or used proximity to change the rate at which the servo moves as opposed to the angle the servo approaches. For the next project I would like to take a more creative approach.

Katie:

This project was not very challenging, and in retrospect I believe that was because we simply didn’t challenge ourselves enough. We met the requirements of putting together parts, but we didn’t create any kind of narrative around why anyone would want to put those parts together, and we didn’t explore very creative or interesting interactions. Although it functions as expected, our end result is not something I would be excited to include in my portfolio.

That being said, the challenge of wiring parts that I hadn’t previously used was enough that I believe it would have taken me several hours to do on my own. Because Nathan was far more experienced than I was with both wiring and programming, I was able to pick up some techniques and shortcuts that I didn’t previously know. I learned a shortcut for wiring the 5v and ground rails of a breadboard that requires less wires. I also learned to use the “map” function in C.

For the next project, I am looking forward to putting a lot more thought into the design of the device and thinking through the user experience of the interactions. I am also looking forward to the challenge of having to figure out how to wire components on my own, and the independence to work at my own pace.