PROCESS
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Scope:
At the start of the project we had grand plans for the smart house. We planned to use two arduinos, have two LCD displays and have a bathroom in the house, separate to the main area with its own sensors and responses. Our stretch goals were to be able to control the house using a cell phone. But over the course of the project we realized that we had set even our initial goals to high for the short amount of time we had to complete the project, and had to scale back the amount of functions that were present within the house.
Failure:
Apart from the skills we learned, like soldering and laser cutting, the most impactful lesson we learned was dealing with the failure of our smarthome during class presentation.
We had the project sections working individually and connected them together before presentation, but when we presented the system we were unable to receive alerts from the Xbee. Dealing with the fact that even though we felt like we worked hard and it didn’t work was difficult to process. One day too late, after frustration and disappointment, we realized that one of the things that was causing our project to fail was a folder on Lydia’s computer and after deleting the folder all of the programming worked perfectly. However, since we had realized the issue too late, we were unable to continue to test our Trome with the alerts, because we had missed our window for receiving alerts. Knowing that there was such a simple solution to our problem, yet not discovering it on time was an interesting lesson on how to deal with failure and a growing experience.
Successes:
We were successful in scrolling text, time, and temperature on the LCD display. The scrolling itself took several tries for us to figure out, however we eventually were able to understand the functions of the LCD and were able to alert our occupants of the current time and current temperature of the house as well as display a welcome message.
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Additionally, we were successful in creating a supportive base for our house that acted as a tree. We spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to create a proper tree that would also be supportive and eventually, with guidance from our professor Dr. Brock Craft, decided to create a square base attached together by brackets. Inside the base we used books and cardboard in order to support the Arduino, breadboard and all of the wires that were crammed between the cardboard and the base of the house.