Blog #3: Halloweeeeeeeeeeen!!!!!!!!!!

Our most recent assignment was to build a Halloween themed animatronic. My group and I decided to go with a Harry Potter theme. We created a life size Voldemort holding a baby Harry Potter, who "Avada Kedavra"-ed him with a green laser pointer when a button was pushed.

I think the main thing that went very well on this project was us working together as a group. I thought we did a pretty good job of dividing the work up so that everyone was always working on something, and always working on their strengths. For instance, while Kim and I worked on mechanics of Voldemort's body, Elisa and Amelia painted Voldemort's head and hands.

I feel like the time management of our project could have gone better. I think we spent a little too much time making Voldemort look good when we could have really used just one extra week working on the robotics/motion mechanisms. As a result, while Voldy basically did what we wanted him to, his arms didn't match up quite right, the wand arm didn't stay up quite as long as we wanted it to, and the light in Harry's head wasn't quite perfectly aligned. We should have spent more time working out the kinks and issues in the code.

If I had to give myself one piece of advice for the capstone project based on my experiences during this project, it would be to focus more and earlier on the more difficult less fun parts of the project. Even though it may be tempting to perfect the easy, fun aspects of the project, this will likely result in me scrambling at the very end to get all the tricky parts done.