Today we had a short catch up with Dr Ho on the status of our project, before getting down to business. We showed him our gantt diagram, and our current progress — slow but steady.
Unabashedly admitted to be currently struggling with RPi given the steep learning curve… Dr Ho kindly pointed out that we aren’t alone in this struggle, and the potential to collaborate with many other teams! We described the brief idea of the boat design, and given the lack of materials yet, there was little to troubleshoot… yet. With that, Dr Ho left us in an optimistic place to continue working on the blueprints of our project.
We then continued a short discussion to officially divide the roles among our team into 2 segments, one for the software and the other for the hardware.
While Jing Rui and Zheng Xun stayed in the lab to continue figuring out the software part, Anita and I started searching for components to assemble the boat. Tomorrow, we will be heading down to the suppliers to physically get the items, including the tupperware and PVC pipes. If only we could get a ride from NTU…
Meanwhile, the guys toggled with the RPi and managed to code with it, getting the hang of the code editor! They were able to hook up some LEDs and wrote a simple Puthon programme using the Pi’s code editor (otherwise known as an IDE)
Tinkering with RPi (short vlog!)
The mentors on patrol were also able to advise us on how to set up a webpage to control the pumps, and encouraged us to pick up html, css and flask — we’re officially on our way to becoming computer science engineers now!
Additionally, we learned how to identify the components of RPi — or rather more specifically, the pins on RPi. Who knew that electrical components had a gender too?
The day ends on a high note with excitement for tomorrow and our ‘shopping spree’!