Printing and Procrastination

One way I like to procrastinate is by doing other work– no matter how trivial or unimportant it is– and pretending that doing this work is productive. This is what I’ve done for my Physical Computing Final. Instead of fabricating the hat or trying out the wiring, I decided to design the sticker takeaways for it and make brochures to help people who aren’t familiar with Harry Potter.

Unfortunately, I probably should’ve spent more time wiring or fabricating because I faced a great deal of challenges later on. None of my components seem to work properly, and I’m having headaches figuring it out.

First of all, including the libraries bloat my code to a great degree, so I spent time optimizing my code and making it run in less than 100% of the Uno’s memory space. I could use a Mega, but that’s money to consider. I know I can optimize, so why not? You can see the code on the github: https://github.com/metermaid/sortinghat

I then had problems getting the speakers to work with my mp3 shield. I might have to use the headphone jack for the playtest, since that works. I tried speakers from the shop to ensure– it’s not just my speakers.

I also had a huge headache working with the accelerometer I bought. I first implemented it as is, but the data was noisy. I then implemented a Kalman filter, which didn’t work very well. Finally, I used the Arduino library by Jeff Rowling, which worked, but consistently had FIFO overflow errors. I can adjust the sizes of the buffer in the library, but this seems like a fundamental problem that isn’t my perogative. I am considering going back to the Kalman filter, or trying out an Arduino 101. I just would rather not spend the money…

And gosh, I didn’t even attempt the servos this time around. What state will I be in next week?

On the bright side, I fabricated another paper hat. He’s very witchy.