1. Principles and practices

This week I worked on setting up my documentation site and beginning to finalize an idea for my final project.

Research

I first learned about GitLabs and how I would be documenting through it on January 23, 2025. One of my local teachers, Dr. Taylor gave a presentation about terms we needed to know such as repository, pushing, committing, merging, and branches. He also skimmed through the how we would find our SSH key, valuable resources to find including Teddy Warner’s documentation which helped me install Mkdocs, pip and python. All were necessary to install Mkdocs which I used instead of HTML editor because of how much simpler it was for me.

Process

First Steps

My step by step process is show below.

a. I downloaded Python, Visual Studio Code, Homebrew and Pip. You should find all the links on Teddy’s site.

b. At first I wanted to use HTML editor before I decided to switch to Markdown, so I didn’t download Mkdocs until later and I didn’t use Markdown files either.

c. I needed to create my SSh key which I did by following the instruction on the presentation. I struggled with this part for a decent while. After creating it I saved it to my documents and uploaded it to GitLabs. I needed the SHH key so I could verify that it is me whenever I commit any work done locally.

d. After this I cloned the template files given to me from Julian into Visual Studio code using my SHH key.

e. from there I edited those HTML files very slowly because I was getting use to editing this kind of code

f. However after working with these files for three days and reading some more of Teddy’s documentation I decided to try and use the Mkdocs Statics Site generator which is powering the site you are on right now. I had to download Mkdocs using Python, Pip and Homebrew which I highly recommend. This generator relies on Markdown files and can also accept HTML. However I had some serious problems with actually running the MKdocs serve command because of how I had my files in my Repo. After help from a very smart friend Noah Smith who explained to me that I needed to delete my existing Repo and start again from the Mkdocs template that Julian provided not the HTML ones.

g. After re-cloning the files using my SHH key, I can finally tested the Mkdocs serve command and it successfully generated my site. Which i could access by typing in the link that was created in the terminal below.

h. From here I would type in the command: Mkdocs serve auto so that whenever I saved the files it would automatically create those changes in my example website .

i. To bring images into my site i used the automatic MacBook Air image converter to compress and change my images to jpg or jpeg.

Problems

My initial problem is that I didn’t understand exactly what Gitlab, Github, and what all the terms seen above actually were. So I tried to do what I normally did on google sites or anything like that and I was very lost. Luckily I had previous fab students Teddy Warner, Zach Budzichowski, and one of the current students Amalia Bordoloi to go off of. Without their documentation I could not have finished this week successfully.

c. The main problem I experienced with my SSH key is that I didn’t realize that I actually had already downloaded it to my computer. So I wasted time trying to download it again and again. Be sure to check that your commands are correct.

f. The problem with mkdocs serve was that I had HTML files and mkdocs files that were conflicting with each other. To solve this I deleted my entire Repo and started again from the Mkdocs template. Tyler’s Week One Advice: Pick early on whether to use HTML or Mkdocs.

Final project Idea

I sketched my final project idea out and had Chat Gpt recreate it virtually as well to get a better idea of how I want to create it. Its purpose is to be remotely controlled from the users phone giving them a camera view of the direction the project is moving. My working name for the project is land-drone but it could use some work. I want to be able to throw it and have it land safely and successfully. I can use a webserver for the networking maybe with the seeed Esp32S3 camera.

Credit to People

Thank you Ellie Hahn for letting me use her photos of the error messages because I did not screen shot them on my own computer.

Credits to AI

You can view the Chat GPT conversation here.