Within my Project 3, I took the lead on programming as this was an area I wanted to improve and build upon. I massively improved my Arduino programming skills, alongside learning how to set up a WebSocket in order to use our product wirelessly, and how to receive this wireless transmission within our Figma prototype. This proved quite problematic, as Figma doesn’t natively support input from the serial output of an Arduino or reading from a WebSocket. Therefore, I had to find a workaround. I used Processing (a skill I acquired in Creative Programming last year) to simulate key presses on the device, and those key presses were then read by the Figma prototype.

After discussing this frustration with a fellow student with a passion for programming, they referred to adaptability as being one of the most important skills any programmer, or designer, can have. If you are able to adapt to a situation and find creative workarounds, you are much more likely to succeed and create great products—even more so than if you’ve simply memorised existing functions or methods. If we are truly trying to innovate, as I hope to do, then we can’t always rely on existing solutions and methods.

Something else I would like to note here is the importance of collaboration. As this is an expertise area that I have little background in, I find it extremely frustrating when something isn’t working as I expect it to. Within my P3 I spent 60+ hours trying to get the code to provide the correct sensitivity and responsiveness so that it correctly identified the RFID tags without false positives or negatives. I would have given up many times if I didn’t have my teammates celebrating the little wins, when something would improve slightly or a new aspect worked, this helped to motivate me to continue and gave me a desire to impress them and prove to them, and myself that I could do it. This shows me how important it is to share your work and progress with a group even if you are doing an element alone, as this will help to keep you motivated and willing to continue.

The Logic for our front-end prototype.

This was controlled by reading the processing key presses which were triggered by changes in the serial output on my websocket link which was generated by my M5Stack Microcontroller. The code for the two different programmes can be viewed bellow in the appendix of my report.