Sunday 28 July 2013

Okay.. So.. We failed.


It's been a while since we updated the blog, mostly because we were procrastinating like crazy.

Why?

Because we failed to complete the Quadcopter project. Or even begin to do it.

Reasons why I think we failed:

  • We got really excited by the project and did zero research on the topic, and the parts. We ordered some very cheap speed controllers, and later realized from the forums that that was a bad idea. 
  • We hugely underestimated the amount of work we would have had to put in. HUGELY. 
  • The course load of college caught up with us. 
  • And we were lazy. 
And like we told our mentors and the contest organizers, this was a good lesson learnt in under-promising and over-achieving. 

BUT there is a silver lining here. 
We have a lot of stuff to build a quadcopter and we also plan to team up with a group in college that have been doing some really good work on the topic! More on that later.

And while we were procrastinating to update the blog, a few things happened:

1. We participated in the awesome Design and Innovation workshop conducted by the awesome people from MIT Medial labs.
We worked on a tiny project called Beat Feet with the awesome Priyans M and Rishemjit Kaur.
 It basically involved a pressure sensor on my shoe to detect a tempo and play a pre-programmed beat. 
The project was featured on the official Arduino blog!

2. Our college required us to submit a 'mini-project' for our 6th semester. 
Akshay and I decided to make a guitar tuner along with Anjana Shekhar
We went with Amanda Ghassaei's Instructable on Arduino Frequency Detection.
We really wanted it to work on the autocorrelation concept, but that didn't work for some reason.
Maybe we can fix it with an RTOS implementation?
But anyway, read about it on our project report!

3. We participated in the Freescale Cup for 2013! And lost.
More on that when we have something useful to post. :(
Control systems is evil.


And that's it for now.
We are working on some crazy things for our college satellite project and I really hope we get some time off to work on more tiny yet awesome projects.

Until next time!
- Bhargav