Capstone Fair

I will say, first off, that I shouldn’t have rushed the setup, it ultimately just made things worse. The hardware ended up looking great, but I didn’t have time to actually sync the softwares and make sure I had everything I needed open.

I also should’ve closed the door so that a crowd that large wouldn’t have piled up, because that also didn’t help the nerves.

I also should’ve just ignored the hardware bugs that kept popping up and focused more on making sure the user experiences were actually setup. It did provide a pretty good demonstration of the writing capabilties of the project, though, considering I was able to take a blank tag and program a user experience on the fly, as well as talk about the commandline standard I was using.

At least I was still able to get the parts working separately so that I could at least show everyone the lights and the music separately. Even then, I found it kind of funny how a lot people thought that the music with a static colored background was my project. I really wish I could’ve shown them everything working together.

Speaking of everything working together, at this point, there aren’t any software bugs, but the hardware bugs make the platform incredibly unstable. Pretty much the only experience I can actually run is John Fitzell’s because it doesn’t make use of the EQ at the same time as the NFC reader.

I also feature this video later in the tutorial I provide, which I highly recommend you look through because I took a lot of time to make it and I think I did well :). It also provides a good overview of all of the parts working independantly.

Anyways, other than the reactions of the kids, It seemed that Jara and Krista both enjoyed the project in its semi working state, I remember Jara being particularly interested in the software portion and how I had threaded the Arduino. Jason seemed to really enjoy the concept when I described it to him, and hoped that I would continue working on it and fleshing it out (he mentioned something about a hypothetical Capstone Extension). Joseph sadly didn’t get to see much of it. The worst part is that due to the distractions caused by the Capstone not working, I didn’t actually get any photos of the whole room assembled.

In terms of what specifically went wrong during the Capstone Fair, and what keeps going wrong, I will discuss this in the second document where I go over the hardware bugs that plagued my Capstone and how I still have no idea what’s causing them.