Vicknesh’s (Group Leader [Most Valuable Player]) Personal Learning Experience:

To be honest, I have learnt a lot from this project and it will be tough to put all of that here. To preface, I am the team leader and it is my first time leading also. As such, it took me time to blend in with the other members and then organize and schedule activities in the right way. I actually have no experience in coding or even sketching of models. I ended up mostly working with the electronics parts and being an Aerospace Engineering student, I had no clue where to start. I got started with Raspberry Pi like all other teams and thought it was the only option available to us and thus started working with it. Midway through the project, I realized that when I do something as a group leader, I must have visions of future prospects for the project which my team is currently working on. Our end goal is to create an autonomous vehicle to gather floating rubbish and to have a positive impact on society as a whole. To do this, we had a vision to build a fully autonomous boat to gather floating rubbish. The second vision is to empower young children with this technology. Children are the future of any nation. Therefore, we need to encourage them into playing a part in saving the environment. A prospect pertaining to our project is an RC controlled boat by children which allows them to clean the environment whilst having fun at the same time. In any of these two pathways, we need to make sure that the coding involved is sophisticated enough so that future enhancements do not suffer due to a weak foundation. Thereafter, I started to look for better alternatives to go with the project. The reason in finding alternatives is because we don’t need the eminent bodybuilder, Arnold Schwarzenegger to open a flimsy wooden door for us to walk through. We can do that ourselves. This applied to using Raspberry PI for the brains of our project which I found to be an overkill.  Instead, I chose a better, cheaper and more efficient alternative called ESP 32 and I was able to explain my stand for it and finally it did prove its efficiency.

The final product which we have made is very modular and has a lot of room for improvement, but the working principle behind it is simple and elegant so that enhancements to this model would be a piece of cake. 

To sum up what I have written above, I can surely tell you that I learnt a good amount of basic coding to help out in future projects, leadership skills and most importantly time management. Apart from these skills, I did learn some minor but essential skills in the journey of building this prototype.  I hope all of you have enjoyed reading this blog, primarily courtesy of Max, and I thank you a lot for contributing your valuable time.

I am always available for those who want to work with me and take this project further.

Contact me at: vickysai@yahoo.com

Max’s (Finance/Logistics Manager and Blog Writer) Personal Learning Experience:

Long story short, the non technical lesson that I learned was that creating your own product even with group members can become exceedingly tedious. There are many possibilities as well as choices in designing and choosing materials/components and hence sometimes I am overwhelmed by the sheer number of options. I was primarily the person in charge of finances and that also meant that I was in charge of logistics, and so I was the one who sourced the overwhelming majority of all the various used and unused parts in our boat. I had to spend a lot of time researching on the suitable and compatible parts (with other parts). I also had to find the cheapest parts and the geographically closest available seller, in order not exceed our allocated budget and for the fastest delivery times respectively.

My main non technical learning experience is already written in the first sentence of the first paragraph. I learned and experienced first hand that creating a product from scratch is extremely time consuming and especially if it ultimately a meticulous product. I would have planned my time spent on this project more pragmatically and thereafter diligently followed this schedule. In addition, I would have also influenced my other 2 group members to do the same as well, because we all faced this issue. This issue is none other than having to cram a large workload into a short amount of time, because we did not consistently spend time on our required workload at the outset of this project. 

Steven’s (Safety Officer and Parts Assembly Manager)

Personal Learning Experience: 

I feel that what I’ve learned is too much to be put into sentences. The first thing that comes to my mind is about the researching parts. I think that we really need to research more about the parts that we are going to buy before purchasing so much of them. Some parts such as the propellers, cannot work in the end. And our first microcontroller, Raspberry Pi, ended up replacing the ESP32, because it turns out that  we don’t really need an expensive or powerful microcontroller for our project. I also learned a lot from our leader, Vicknesh, about our code. He really contributed the most to our project, I would say most of our current boat design was really influenced by Vicknesh’s idea. The next thing that I have learned a lot from this project is the use of Solidworks, I learned a lot from, again, our leader, Vicknesh, about how to design 3D printing parts. I also learned that we need to print our parts in a certain orientation so that they won’t break apart easily. Because I’m mostly in charge of assembling the boat, I feel like this process of assembling all the parts of our boat is a really energy-consuming and time-consuming process, sometimes some parts need to be cut and then we need to print some more 3D parts to connect to other parts. However, I felt that even though we need to first research more before buying something, it is also a good thing that we bought the items first. In that way, we have learned a lot more than what we should have. It also meant that at least we can start doing something hands on first.

In short, I have learned a lot of coding skills and 3D designing skills. I also learned a lot about some other soft skills along the way that I believe are useful for my future.

Last but not least, I would like to express my gratitude to Vicknesh who has been the most enthusiastic and has been the one who contributed the most ideas to our design, and Max, for his effort in doing a really good job on this blog. I would also like to thank you Dr Ho,  and all the teaching assistants that have helped us a lot.