Our assignment for this week was to complete our final project, tracking our progress:
We also needed to work on our documentation during developement (which isn't that easy at start, but gives the benefits later) and to keep an eye on demand vs supply-side time management. The good thing was to plan our project to be spiral-developed.
The spiral developement means that you need to focus on functionality to implement your idea as fast as it's possible. You need to do all the parts at the bare minimum level and assemble them to have a functioning system. Then you scale up our project and set the new level of minimal sufficiency.
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This puctures show us how to get from the very idea to the final prototype of our project. For better understanding I divided the process on several steps:
1. You have an idea - an image in your mind you would like to implement and yet you don't know exactly how to do that.
2. You start thinking on your idea's implementation and it will not be a big surprise if you suddenly understand that the whole thing is a system that can be divided in some subsystems and each of them will interact with some others somehow. That means that you split your workflow and have some tasks to work on. Set up the bare minimus level for each of them and go on!
3. Develop the project! Work on your tasks trying to implement them according to the minimal requirements you have set. It is useful to ude demand-vs-supply time-management here. The work will always "eat" all the time you give it, so you better not set up your plan to "fit everything". Instead of this you better fit the main things in limited time and get the whole unperfect picture instead of one polished piece of it.
4. Here, when all the tasks are finished, you take a look at the result and analyse it. On one hand you already have the prototype working (or presentable conception instead of just an idea) and you can try to dictribute it or show it to investors or use it for yourself (if that was something you designed for your personal use). On the other hand some improvements may need to be done and in this case you start everything again: you analyse the structure, set the tasks, implement them, analyse the result and so on... Untill everything is good enough to fit your expectations. But here again, don't forget about supply-vs-demand time management!
I want to run the spiral developement, so I need to set the bare minimum levels for iteration_0, iteration_1 and so on. But first I need to shape the idea itself and describe the undetailed structure of my project. More detailed description of this process you may find on my final project page
The idea for my final project is to make a lamp (multi-coloured) that is controlled by gestures and provides the end-user with the brand new user experience in customising his surroundings. I call it theremin-lamp after the musical instrument theremin (or thereminvox) and it's inventor, russian engineer and physicist Leo Theremin (because my lamp works on the similar physical principles with this instrument). More information about my final project can be found at my final project page.
Slide for my final project:
Completed:
remain:
Iteration_0 works which means:
What doesn't work:
I want to finish iteration_1 before graduation, but that's just beginning for this project. As I mentioned in my dissemination plan, I would like to promote my project in future and I hope that iteration_2 and research for further improvement will be finished by december-2015.
A lot of things! Managing the workflow, using new interesting sensors (I haven't tried capacitive before); I improved my level at electronics, embedded programming, digital fabrication and prototyping.
And what's most important, I speeded up my life, learned that there is a lot of things to study and understood that I don't want to stop!
