We faced two main problems while building our product. Instead of soldering the wires, our team decided to use alligator clips to connect the arduino with our build up. We thought doing so would save us time and prevent us from having the build up be permanent (since we wanted to be able to pull the build up apart and take it home afterwards). However, using the alligator clips created a lot of conflict throughout. First off, having the same colors made it difficult to differentiate between one wire with another at first. We created a solution by adding labels onto the wires. The second problem we faced was trying to get the alligator clips through the cut holes. Due to the large size of the clips, it took a lot of effort trying to push them through the cut holes. Another main problem we faced was scaling the buildings and gate properly. We assumed the scale to be larger, but soon realized that the size we chose was two times larger than what we intended. Fortunately, we had enough time to re-scale and laser cut the correct size.

 

In addition, there was not a legit failure we faced, but the process of building our product took significantly longer than we had expected. What we thought would be finished within just three afternoon meetings in the Comotion Lab, quickly turned into a six consecutive days of working for timeless hours in building the university.

 

Pushing the problems aside, our project was a complete success overall. Watching a lot of teams be unable to get their project to work during the class demos, we were very afraid the same thing might have happened to us. We are so lucky that we tested our project when setting it up before the demos started. It did not work at first and we started panicking, but we found out that it was just one wire that was not fully connected to the breadboard.

​

This tells us that the amount of effort we put with both our code and physical component of our build up went well. All in all, we now have a good glimpse of what the engineers experience out in the real world. It takes so long to finalize our project, working for increments of five hours for seven consecutive days, trying to test and put everything together into one. We definitely gained appreciation for the work the engineers do.