It was time for another week of working on the theme project and as the deadline loomed closer and closer it was really time to get down to business and kick things into high gear. I had to learn many things during the entire week as I had volunteered to do the electronics for the team together with my teammate Jun Jie.
The first things to do with any project was to acquire the physical parts needed to make the prototype. As without the various electrical components and sensors, it would not be possible to build the prototype or test any of our code. We acquired our parts through the use of TaoBao. This was my first lesson of the week, learning how to TaoBao. What??? Learning how to Taobao in the last month in China??? Well, to be fair I have not had a need to TaoBao anything since coming to China so I simply had no need for it until now. So I started off learning how to navigate the App, buying items and communicating with sellers. It was a pretty smooth experience since I had my teammate to show me the ropes. After the items had arrived, I learned how to collect the items which were pretty straightforward once I went through the motions.
While waiting for the various parts to arrive, I practiced day by day coding for the different components using Arduino. It was quite a challenge at the start as I had not touched coding in months and Arduino used a different language from what I had learned before. I started off with some revision of coding language before learning about the various syntax of C++ ie. Arduino language. After that, I began to try to code for simple things such as LEDs and button and slowly progressed to controlling the actual components that we would be using in our product itself. It was slow at first but I slowly got used to the coding and got faster over time. Another thing I had to learn was about the circuits and how to construct them in use for Arduino and the various components. With a combination of my teammate Yuan Long and many Youtube and Google tutorials I learned a lot and got more comfortable with the electronics and coding at the same time.
As the week ended, it was time for the electronics team to start consolidating what we had learned over the week and combine our efforts to create the final code for the product and work out the entire logical flow and process of our product.
