Server issues

This week the team and I needed to make sure that the server was up and running before the exhibition. Sigurd and Thomas had already made the sever work for their prototypes but it was important that it worked for all of our team members. However, as we tried to send the colour values over the server it became apparent that something was wrong and it just refused to cooperate with us. After several hours of trying to make it work we simply had to give up since other tasks were more pressing

Later this week while Tuva was trying to make it work it suddenly just did. What was initially wrong and how we fixed it some a bit of a mystery but thankfully we managed to make it work.

I also learned this week that Sigurd's prototype is broken, so for the exhibition we will only have 3 functioning prototypes. This shouldn't be a problem but it would have been ideally if everyones prototype could be displayed on the exhibition.

Website

This week I became mostly finished with the websites design, the only thing that remains is writing the content which I find to be the boring part of building a website. However, I must say I became very pleased with the header image I created for the website. I was inspired by the sketching tools for arduino and created it to look like a breadboard etc.

In the end, I though this project was fun and I learned a lot about the theme and creating prototypes using Arduino.

I think the correct phrase to use for this week is that I survived. I’m pleased that I was able to get everything done, and also relieved that I don’t have to stress about it anymore.

That said, I’m largely unhappy with how I completed most of the tasks this week. I struggled to put my portfolio together, and there is a lot that could have been improved. I’m particularly disappointed with my reflection section, and I hope to make up for it somewhat with the final reflection submission. I also had technical issues with my prototype leading up to and during the exhibit. I think the problems I had with Processing were to do with my Arduino being faulty, so sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn’t. I spent so much time trying to troubleshoot the inconsistency that I wasn’t able to make any other progress on the functions or form. As a result, the pressure readings, which were the key feature of the concept, were not implemented fully, and the prototype had no form at all. I’m overall disappointed with how my prototype was presented, and if I was able to do it all over again, I would spend a lot more time on the weights and pressure readings, as well as invest some time into creating a form, and perhaps look more into simulating some features, rather than spending all my time trying to get it to function fully.

The only part of this week I was happy with was our final team report, mostly because I was able to work on it with my other team members. I think I would have been much happier with my work this semester if I had been able to work on it fully with my team members. Unfortunately, due to circumstances, that wasn’t possible, and I am still pleased that I was able to push myself and learn some new skills in the process.

Exhibition

It was really interesting having an online exhibition on Discord. The first half an hour went by without anyone joining our channel but after that there were many visitors. Some came in without saying anything and some stayed really long and asked many questions. There were many 'aww's and laughter when I was showing the functions of Spud (really similar with the user testing with my friends) and everyone said they liked it which I am very pleased about.

It has quite challenging demonstrating the functions of Spud through a webcam as it would be better for them to experience it by themselves. I used the smaller Spud form as the 'person approaching the user' which when I think back, wasn't a good choice as it made quite many people confused of why there were two Spuds interacting with each other. This was also my fault as I assumed that they had looked through my portfolio first before coming. I realised my mistake later in the exhibit and explained why there were two Spuds before I demonstrated anything.

Everything worked well and went smoothly except for the voice recognition software that registered everything as 'dance' so Spud kept dancing and a incident where the 9v battery ran out of power and Spud's movable parts went all wonky. It would also have been nice if I had set the voice recognition software to listen to the visitors' voices as some people asked whether they could try to talk to Spud.

Although I am sad that we could not do the exhibit in-person as the atmosphere would be more exciting and interactive, it was still a fun and a bit more relaxing experience at home. Even though we still have the team report and the critical reflection essay due, it feels like the course has come to an end. It was a long and challenging semester but I also had a really fun time building Spud. I am also very thankful for the teaching staff helping us in this difficult time. Hopefully, it would be better for both the teaching staff and students next semester.

The final week have come and gone, and we all made it through to the end. In the last days leading up to the exhibition, we revisited our team reflection one last time before handing it in and tested to see if our prototypes worked one last time after having merged our codebases. Finally, it worked to send messages to each other with all code merged! Although my prototype still was broken, we were able to show off our combined effort at the trade show.

As for the tradeshow, at first, we did not get many visitors, so we had an extended chat with Ben before Matt later arrived. Marie mostly held the presentations as her ball was one of the more reliable ones in terms of sending information to the others, whereas Tuva's worked half of the time and Thomas' broke midway through. Thomas was able to fix his again for the rest of the exhibition though. Later on, we had a flock of visitors who wanted to check out our concept, which was nice, and we did receive a lot of positive feedback. It was also nice to see how some of the other projects ended up and peoples' creativity in finding a way to prototype their concepts. All in all, it was a great ending to a long and exhausting semester, so I'm glad we can put that behind us and keep focusing on the thesis.

I didn't really receive any feedback on my portfolio, except from within my team. Seeing some of the other portfolios I decided that my time would be better spent working on the thesis rather than fine-tuning a few more things on the website, as it is rather good already.

Thank you to all for a good semester!