Mentor Feedback & Review

Zack Weaver

Before meeting with Zack, I didn’t know who my second mentor would be and if I could find one on time. I showed up to his office hours at the Boulder Community Library in the Maker Space and was able to get amazing help for my project and great feedback as well. Below includes the feedback I received from him. One of the errors that I was struggling with for my project was getting the three different frequencies to parse out correctly, he suggested going back to square one, re-working the hardware and the code, then coming back to the three different frequencies. In doing such, I found that I had a short in my circuit that was causing the code to not work properly. Additionally, I was not mapping my input values correctly so I was not able to interpret the input value correctly to get the vibrating motors to work. Once all those issues were fixed we had a discussion on how to further improve my project. He really emphasized to me that anytime you are multiplying a hardware system, you need to focus on getting one working, perfected and ensure you understand it before moving on to develop multiple.

Another piece of Zack’s advice to me was to try capacitor signal smoothing by connecting a positive end of the capacitor to the A0 input and the negative side to the ground. This would allow me to get reliable input values because there would not be as much possibility for extra current to pass through the haptic motor driver. Since I am working with analog signals, this was his best guess at debugging why my vibrating motors would proceed to vibrate even when music wasn’t playing.

Zack noted that my debugging skills for code were very strong, but debugging for hardware could still use some work and I will continue to improve with this as the project progresses. He recommended that a multimeter would be good to analyze if the current is moving properly through the system. Furthermore, with my coding, I have some fixed numbers to establish how strong the vibrating motors are putting out a signal. Zack said that as I continue to work with Arduino code, or really any language of code, that I will be able to write some sort of calibration code that allows those values to update themselves. He noted, “this is something that is more of an intermediate level thing. If you can get there by the end of the semester, you will be set for any errors with this project in the future”. Upon, doing some research while we were talking, we discussed how calibration happens in the front end of the code as opposed to during it’s running.

Zack’s feedback to me was to clean up my wiring as much as possible. Include some text labels so I don’t have to search every time I want to try to determine which motor is powering which one of the parsed frequency ranges. Really having those short wires, organized circuits and labeled wires helps when more elements are added on. Additionally, when trying to debug, having that organized will help to spot the shorting of circuits or missing connection much easier.

He then left me with this final quote of feedback that reassured me that I can complete this project: