Sprint 3

If sprints had catch phrases, Sprint 3’s catch phrase would be “quit while you’re ahead”. In this sprint we decided to reevaluate our final deliverable and scale back where we could. At this point, we had poured almost 48 hours into the crochet alone and it was clear that if we were going to make the full 1x3 meter sculpture we were hoping to make, we would have to treat this project like a 9-5 job until it was due which wasn’t going to be possible with everyone’s busy schedules. Instead we decided to dedicate our efforts to polishing the MVP we had created for Sprint 2.

Mechanical

For the mechanical subteam, this meant focusing on connecting the crocheted textile to the motors rather than adding more motors to the peg board and creating a larger textile.

Electrical and Firmware

The electrical and firmware subteams had already done everything they needed to do to get the MVP up and running. They spent most of their time focusing on documentation and website creation.

Software

The software team shifted their focus from getting the code running on a Raspberry Pi to fine tuning the algorithm in order to get the best results from our deliverable. The software was the only part of the project that we could easily change at this point. This meant that any improvements we wanted to make to the sculpture-viewing experience would need to manifest themselves as software updates.

Reflection

By the end of Sprint 3 we had a fully working 1x1 kinetic sculpture that used computer vision to sense a person’s location in space and have the kinetic sculpture react accordingly. Even though we weren’t able to meet all of our stretch goals like using all 50 motors or having the computer vision program run on a Raspberry Pi, we are still super happy with our results. We’ve also done a good job of setting us up to continue the project if we want to try and scale what we have to work with 50 motors.