Now that we’ve met deadline and can think clearly, perhaps we should take a second to step back and think about what just happened lol
Catch our reflections and insights from the project below:
Eureka Moment
All hands are on deck in the effort of creating a website to counteract the emergency that’s fallen in our laps of there being an out of date instructable we’ve been taking cues from. Our hope is that this can be our most significant contribution back to the community we’ve been inspired by to do this project in the first place. Our website’s biggest pull hopefully will be that it can be used to help others not fall into the same hole that we have. It will feature a means for people to keep the instructable up to date for sure!
It may be a work in progress or it may be complete, only one way to know…visit our super cool massively hopefully wildly popular website: http://kristanwoolford.wix.com/tweet2speech
Presentation Preparation
Its crunch time…so accordingly, there’s little time for blogging. We recently discovered that our instructable is more dated than we initially realized, and if you know anything about software and software updates, you probably have a pretty good idea of how much of a panic we’re in…
Nonetheless, we will persevere, and press on. There is a worry though that Travis has completely stopped sleeping in the name of figuring out a solution. Let’s just hope this ends well?
While our physical prototype may have taken a hit, check out where we stand as a group. Thankfully, in design research, even when things don’t go according to plan, there’s always a lesson to be learned and ways in which others can benefit from tracking our progress. A snapshot of our research can be downloaded by clicking here.
Practice Makes Perfect
So we had our first day of serious and it was building….interesting. We immediately could tell that all the materials we were using were not exactly the sturdiest. There were definitely a few times that we had things connected to the appropriate inputs but we weren’t reliably getting the appropriate results. This will definitely have to be something that gets addressed and we get closer to our final iteration.
Concrete Decisions
We’ve waited pretty much as long as we could to decide the ultimate direction of the project and what the final use case for it will be. See how things played out, check out the final showdown below:
Materials have arrived!!
After much anticipation, everything we need is finally in the group’s possession.
Now’s the time to start finalizing our production schedule. We definitely want to make sure the group has more than enough time to work through the instructable enough times that we can really familiarize ourselves with it, and be prepared for any possible hiccups along the way.
To pivot or not to pivot….
We recently presented to our class where we are in terms of the development of this project. The presentation was generally well received, but interesting questions did come to the surface surrounding ways in which could possibly fine tune a use case for this project.
Click the link below to check out our progress so far:
Roles Have Been Assigned!
Christian Locklayer – Project Manager
Travis Gasque – Research & Developent
Kristan Woolford – Documentation & Videography
Determination
♪ My arduino’s not reading all the ports so I have to re-install everything ♫ – Travis Gasque
Our first snag was on January 21, 2014. During the class, we tried tirelessly to connect a spare arduino device Travis already had from previous work to his computer through GA Tech’s Wifi. This, however, posed a large problem. Initially, we thought that his computer simply couldn’t find the device so went about trying to add the device to his computer, but to no avail did anything work. That’s when we came up with the idea to email Melanie, our local computer wizard with our problem. We had decided at this point that we needed an IP address to connect our device to LAWN. She emailed us back saying that we needed to go directly to LAWN’s login page and Un-check “Inbound Security Service” and then login our device on that page using the device’s MAC address.
Option 2: – Ask our IT support staff for a permanent IP address on our department’s local subnet
Ultimately, we went with Option 2. Since the Ethernet Shield lacked any login information it was stuck in the LAWN login “sandbox” and therefore, unable to connect to internet. Another item to note is that this device will only work in Skiles 346. We were most relieved when Melanie created a permanent IP address for us and fixed our first setback.
Launch date
Today we started conceptualizing *Untitled* project. We knew we wanted to create some sort of mechanism that will allow a user to hear thing that is in text form via a speaker. We found the premise for our build here.
Some of our initial use case ideas are:
Doll Therapy
Hands-free tweeting
Family conversation
Sensory disabled users
Over time we’ll nail down the application our final design, and the significance/relationship of the doll to the user.
