20. Project development

Today is my last official day at the Fab Academy and it’s time to take a look back on this final project.

What is the deadline?

As a former attorney, I understand deadlines (well, also as a student, teacher, mother, wife—all of these jobs have deadlines). No one gets to say to the judge “I’m sorry I didn’t turn my brief in on time. Can I have an extension.”

I have never had a problem doing my work on time (or keeping track of my time…in 6 minute increments at $300/hour.)

Blair set me up for 6:45 a.m. June 14th - a Friday.

What tasks have been completed, and what tasks remain?

I completed the doll house a week ahead of my presentation day but I kept adding more things to it. I added a TV (even though I don’t think children should spend time watching TV) because everyone who saw the doll house asked why there was no TV in the living room..or they thought that the picture above the fire place was a TV.

I spent the last week focusing on the electronics (read all about that saga on my Final Project page) and the “packaging”.

My project slide and video were complete days ahead of time but I uploaded them to the wrong place. In true check, then check again, then check one more time that my mother taught me style, it’s a good thing I checked that they were on Neil’s list so that I could move them to the right place the night before my presentation.

What has worked?

My design worked really well. The house is adorable. Everyone is attracted to it and wants to play with it. Even the children.

The electronic clap to turn on the fireplace started working the night before my presentation. I located a close match for the c code and was able to make the small changes so that it works with my clap clap board.

What hasn’t worked?

What doesn’t work surprised me: getting the right voltage and charge into the board. I never thought it would be a problem so I spent very little time in planning or testing the issue until the day before my project was due. I thought I could run the clap board with a 9 volt battery resistor-ed down but the board did not respond to it. It also would not run the code on three AA batteries at 4.8 volts.

It runs through the arduino board powered with a 9 volt battery but there is no place in the doll house to hide a big, old arduino board.

What questions still need to be resolved?

For a real toy, it will have to have a smaller solution to the battery issue.

What have you learned?

This is the $64,000 question, isn’t it? I have learned quite a bit about electronics. The subject never interested me before but once I soldered my first programmer board, I was hooked! I love milling and soldering!

Even though I love a good challenge, getting the boards programmed was a constant source of frustration for me (and I am not easily frustrated). The Lenovo running Ubuntu and connected to the Roland SRM-20 mill would work sometimes but there was no pattern to when it would work. Blair kept telling me about Parallels but I was looking for a sustainable solution – something that we can teach the students – and that was not possible with Parallels because of the cost and the wide variety of computers that the students have.

Our solution was, in part, to buy MacBooks just for our lab. We can put Parallels on those computers and the students can use those when they need to program boards.

By making the Electronic Doll House, I learned more about coding in C. I believe that most of what we need has already been invented - you just have to find it and tweak it. After I found the correct code, I could solve the clap board problem.