We barely have a month’s left in ALP and the reality of travelling back to Singapore’s blazing sun and expensive canteen food is starting to sink in. This ticking clock also represents the time we have left to complete our Theme project which is actually progressing swimmingly. Our Theme now is working in parallel, with half figuring out the EM Sense technology to catalogue and identify different electronic devices, while the other half is working on the GUI to wrap everything up. A big shift in the direction we recently made is the overall direction of our project, which now is to create a handheld/worn device which teaches you to operate any electronic equipment touched by the user. We have shifted from using a Raspberry Pi to a Smartphone since the latter is much faster, has waaay better resolution, and is more portable than a clunky Rpi. As such we needed to shift from Python/Kivy to Java/Android Studios which is a program to create Android apps. Progress has been good thus far, having established a dummy GUI as well as managing to visualise a waveform signature. I am confident that given a few more week we can get a working prototype up.
By far the biggest event this week is the DIP event organised by ZJU to showcase ZJU student projects as well as performances by us SUTD students. Imma assume DIP stands for ‘Design In Progress’. It wasn’t mentioned, but such a guess is apt since we briefly mentioned what all our groups have been working on for the past 2 month-ish. The performances by our students was amazing though, even if I do say so myself. There was a parody skit of the popular game Plants vs Zombie which drew much laughter from the audience. It was adorable, both the characters’ personalities and storyline. Even more so when our students delivered all the lines in Mandarin as well as having makeshift props to portray each scene with. There were musical performances too where our ALP students formed bands amongst themselves to perform a musical number. Two bands, one song each since time limit was tight. The Chinese song drew massive applause from the audience though, even among the seats I could see all the phone screens shoot up to capture the performance. Choosing Chinese content is definitely the way to go to appeal to the audience here. Pro tip. Eventually, the event ended with a performance by the ALP dance crew formed mainly by the Dance Derivativez fifth row members in ALP. There were without a doubt amazing as well and ended the event on a high note. All in all it was a successful event enjoyed by both the ZJU and SUTD side.
Oh, also, this week concludes our weekly lessons, so basically all the time we have left in ALP can be devoted solely to our theme projects.
