Final Project: Planning

My planning involves three things:

1. Sketching for ideating

2. Sketching for planning and keeping track

3. Noting down tasks to do

I did each of those throughout my final project journey. Almost everyday would incorporate some time for sitting and thinking- for planning.

Sometimes, I drew and wrote on paper, sometimes on Whiteboards. And sometimes digitally on an Excel sheet.
And most of time, as I would reach the end of the plan, I would complete the work and abandon the planner. Hence, a lot of times, my planner would not have tasks marked as complete even though I would have done the tasks.

I will share with you my grand excel planner: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1FKK4BDMXRn4QmV3Jlkq4r0PompnJYznNgexbNaFoxDo/edit?usp=sharing

My planning from the 24th of April to the 18th of May took place majorly on the Excel sheet linked above.

1:

2:

3:

Here, I was juggling between Fab assignments and a bit of backlog that was remaining from the weeklies, along with college subjects such as IoT and TCP. Although, I didn’t stick to the plan entirely, I did try my best to get a good amount of things done in these few weeks.

Then, after 18th May, I was free from college subjects and could dedicate my time and efforts to Fab. Particularly to the final project. I had around 3 weeks to catch up and finish my work for the final project.

Somewhere at this point, I grew tired of the excel and began making plans on a whiteboard in class and in my notebooks.

Sketching for Ideating

Phase 1: Notebook

I drew out a bunch of ideas in my Ideation phase few weeks before starting with the final project.

Here, I thought about having a sort of entrance tile to the Atelier which would be made using composites (resin wetlaying). This could possibly be made to look like grass or mud or cobblestone depending on the mold used for the composite (inspired by Adrians Final project composite usage)

I then thought about a player mat with RGB LEDs to indicate various stats from the character sheet.

I even had the idea of using a bookshelf with a servo to make it look a “hidden entrance”. Again, this would be triggered by a Reed switch.

And ofcourse, the rest of tiles stayed the same- the castle, camp etc etc.

I even made sketches of the mechanical joinaries

I started with a very basic Map Layout and narrowed down the tiles I would be making:

This helped me visualize which tiles would go where. And gave me a general sense of the look and feel of each unique tile.

I even redrew the tiles and shaded them to the color of the LED that they would emit along with the light effect.

Tiles like the Bookshelf, the composite entrance, player mat ideas were dropped by me because the volume would become too much to handle.

Phase 2: Whiteboard

Next, I drew the tiles out on the board to keep better track of them:

I also came up with brief schedule on the side of the board. My project was really heavy on CAD and 3D printing. The plan was to finish with CAD within the first week and have things being printed throughout the day (and night).

Notebook planning

A lot of my planning happened in notebook pages.

I made to-do lists of tasks that were to be done in that day or the next.

A lot of these were focused on the CAD and 3d printing as I had a lot of tiles to 3D print and I knew they would take time. So planning in a way to optimize the 3D printing came in really handy!

Here I tried to calculate how many of the “Floor” tiles and “Wall” tiles I would need. Eventually, these numbers changed depending on the situation.

Finally, in the second last week, I had reached a point where I had some of the major tiles ready along with trials done with the 3 by 3 board and copper tape.

This was my bulk manufacturing phase where I needed to get the floor and wall tiles printed in bulk while also getting the other things ready.

I dedicated one whole day to embedded programming and figuring out the light effects. Of course, I did not take up the entire day. This was the day I tried running various light codes like the Fire and the Lightning on the 1 by 1 tile.

I had coded them separately and had not considered that I would need to run them simultaneously. I did not realize that it would be a problem else I would have taken some time out to figure that out on this day. I realized that I can’t run them simultaneously ONE day before the presentation :P

Whiteboard planning

Towards the last week before the presentation day (7th June), my whiteboard looked something like this:

I had mapped out all the tiles and components I needed to fabricate along with HOW MANY of each, and what the current progress was.

I had also redrawn the map from the initial sketch in my notebook.

While fabricating my PCB and deciding the routes for the copper tape, I had drawn out the same for better understanding before fabricating.

The Copper route layout:

The pcb layout:

How the boards might connect:

Closing thoughts

Overall I did not have a very comprehensive task list at hand. I feel that would not work given multiple variables and errors that I might encounter in the journey. Hence, my planning was adaptive. I had an overarching idea in my head for when I will get the major tasks completed but my in detail planning was short term (as you can see from my notes). I did however, spend a couple of minutes every evening going over my plans/tasks lists and updating them to an extent. At times, I would feel that I should change the plan entirely to finish things better.

I think planning can and should become an integral part of our thinking. We should also be able to adapt very quickly in case things don’t go “as planned”. In my Final Project: Developments page I have spoken about my learnings and have talked about my greated learning being to make quick decisions. This arose from the fact that 80% of the time, things wouldn’t be going as planned and I would have to quickly decided on how I can optimize my plan to get the most of the time that I had.

What didn’t work out:

I think the sheer volume of my project was so much that some things were bound to get dropped.

For example, in my first phase of ideation, the bookshelf, player mat, entrance grass/mud idea was dropped instantly because they required more specific details and would not fit perfectly with the Tiles/joinery system in place. Looking back, I could have tweaked them to make them fit but in the rush of the moment it did not strike me.

Next, even in the tiles that I had narrowed down, the Giant Skull tile, the Resin crystal tile, the Hidden Axe tile did not make it to production. Again, this was because of shortage of time. I had to drop these ideas and settle for the 4-5 tiles I could get done in the time left.