5. Reflection

REFLECTION
Today in class I was really glad that we got to just jump right into Arduinos. Even though in my previous posts I mentioned how intimidated I was of them, after seeing all the cool things they can do, I was also very excited to learn how to use them.

Andong and I worked together on the 3 projects in Silvia's Super Awesome book and we ran into a few frustrating points. Overall, it was a good experience but that speaker though. It was really loud and somewhat irritating after the initial novelty of getting it to ring wore off. Especially because we did not understand how touching the analog pins was actually changing the sound. Maybe this would have been different had we used a better quality speaker. But anyhow, at least we managed to pull through and I have more confidence moving forward to work on the examples in Getting Started with Arduino.

Here are the links to the videos demonstrating the test and 3 projects we did:
Blink Test: https://youtu.be/1ll5Sa59omM
Strobe Light: https://youtu.be/9e-3WHZXxO4
Riff: https://youtu.be/ue6EnS1Pgtk
Tapper: https://youtu.be/uKi6bC9CSXc


READING SUMMARY
Massimo Banzi's story of how Arduino started from just an idea to eventually becoming what it is today is really inspiring. It seemed that it was not getting much traction for a while until the professor in NY started to see some opportunity for it to develop and grow and eventually bringing it to several smaller manufacturers was also very helpful. But most of all I was quite impressed with how they just kept doing it, they kept developing it, they kept even the hardware open source and I think that is how it became what it became today. In my experience, I find that a lot of people tend to not take the open source approach. Something I made is something I made and how I made it is a secret. It is my success, I'm not sharing it with you. I myself admit to having such a mentality on more than several occasions. But there definitely is a sense of community and mutual ownership when people are able to let go and allow others to participate and eventually the product that you get is so much better than if it was made by only one person. People with different skills and different backgrounds view things in a different way and can build upon these kind of basic and fundamental ideas in order to advance it and make it bigger and reaching even more people. Open-sourcing definitely a very excellent culture and breeding ground for innovation.

Becky Stern's guide to the Lilypad Arduino is also very interesting. I enjoy sewing things and have done quite a bit of it throughout my childhood. The shapeon the Lilipad and its numerous ports definitely make it more versatile to fabric projects compared to the regular Arduinos. However, I fail to see it being useful in a way other than flashing LED banners, flashing bike bag patches, and maybe the kids annual Halloween costume. Perhaps I should look up some more Lilypad projects. But several questions that came to mind include: are the Lilypads (and their battery holder counterparts) washable? Are they machine-washable? My guess is not. Also, the boards are quite large so I would worry about sitting on them or falling on them and they crack or break. So in that sense, I'm thinking that you just made your clothing item something that you can only wear for a limited period of time since you can't wash it without destroying it, which is perfect for the once-a-year Halloween costume and bike backpack but not so much for my everyday socks. Not that I would want my socks to flash anyway. And what if it rains? Sometimes you can't help but ride your bike home in the rain or heavy mist (common SF weather), will that not destroy the lilypad or at least harvest mold on some parts of the circuits of your bike bag? So all in all, though it is pretty cool that you can now attach electronics to your clothes, unfortunately, I still don't see the usefulness or practicality of it.

I was checking out some Arduino projects on Instructables.com and I came across this project: http://www.instructables.com/id/Instagram-Inspired-DIY-Photo-Booth/
and this project:
http://www.instructables.com/id/A-Makers-Wedding-Photo-booth/
I'm just amazed! This is really cool and it would be something I would really like to do if I had all the time in the world. It would take me several months to a coupe of years to really get a project like this completed due to my skill level with wood and electronics. Not to mention the space needed to store this project while it was in progress. That is not something I have right now. But when I have my own home and garage, I would definitely like to have a workspace to make something like this. Just amazing!