The General Experience
Through the construction of SNEK, there has definitely been a lot of ups and downs. For example, ups like the surge of happiness we feel when the code that we have been working on for weeks finally works or downs like when our first attempt at waterproofing the camera housing resulted in a few drops of water entering the housing. However, most importantly, it was a journey of self-discovery and perseverance – to never give up in the face of obstacles and challenges and as a team, we work together to overcome them! With close to zero knowledge of electronics and coding, we all started learning from scratch and some of us even became proficient at technical skills such as coding, waterproofing, soldering, drilling etc. towards the end of the project. 🙂
About Coding
It was a little challenging and daunting at the start as none of our group members had much experience with coding (besides some python knowledge) and even less with Arduino and web servers. Eventually, we managed to push through and here are a few little things we learnt:
- Start from the basics.
This is to say like when we need to control four motors and six motors, we start with the components individually and with one of each.
Example: one motor –> two motor –> multiple motors, one water pump –> two water pumps –> multiple pumps, combining one motor & water pump –> combining four motors and six water pumps
Even though this process may be tedious, however, this way it is much easier for us to spot errors in the code and add in code lines and trial and error.
- Source for codes on the Internet and take them as references as you write your own to suit the device you are making.
Initially, we thought we could just use codes that were off the Internet after some minor changes to the code lines. However, some of the codes we tried did not work or were incomplete, or that they many have limited functionality. In the end, we decided to write our own – researching online to learn how people write codes for different components (motor, pump, web server etc), combining different kinds of codes to suit our ROV.
- Fall down seven times, get up eight!
Don’t be afraid to trial and error! and don’t give up! From our experience, codes often do not work at the start and require a lot of testing (in our case “just try lor and see how”). We learnt the most from our error codes and after this project, most of us are better acquainted and more confident in arduino coding! 🙂