Wednesday, August 26th 2015
After sleeping quite well, day two arived. After having breakfast and a daily “all hands on deck” standup, we got to work. The first thing I did, was create a desk to stand at. I even gained some XP for it.
The day before, we reached the “rethink” stage. So we set to brainstroming, again.
During this phase I made some drawings to help visualize our plans and design.
During the design session I mentioned a technique from Alistair Cockburns book Writing effective use cases
It basically outlines how people need to be more aware of the level they are on when discussion any topic. It also tries to help developers avoid diving into detail too much (or too soon).
With this in mind, after having talked our way through the minefield otherwise known as “application architecture” we came up with what (and partly how) we needed to build.
At this point we decided to postpone building things until after a break, which involved a (mostly wasp free) lunch.
After the break we went to find a new location to actually write code. In part this was to have a change of scenery and in part to have a difference in spaces in which we either design or program.
Despite the news that rain might be forthcoming we decided to sit outside and code there. Worst case scenario, we would have to work a bit harder to get things done before the rain came.
While Jerry started working on the Bot part, Mitchel and I started on the Arduino part.
We connected the piezo speaker to the Arduino, ran the “play a sound” example, ran the “connect through HTTP” example and ran the aRest Ethernet example.
Some of the things that formed our learning experience were how the save/compile/upload mechanism works. Another thing that made it a lot more pleasant to go through the edit/upload/run cycle were the keyboard shortcuts:
The sun was shining, the wasps were leaving us alone and everyting worked. Things were looking good. So we tried combining the sound and aRest example to have the Arduino play a sound through the REST API.
…and everything fell to pieces.
The sound was triggered but the melody got cut off half way through and after that new versions would no longer upload. Unplugging and re-trying (or uploading another sketch) gave mixed result but all in all… Nothing really worked.
After some searching, poking around and F5 driven debugging, the problem became more apparent. As the aRest example we used was meant to trigger a light it had a line utilizing the watchdog timer.
// Start watchdog
wdt_enable(WDTO_4S);
In some way, this was messing with the timing involved in the playing of the sound and the uploading of the code. This lead to several possible solutions that could be implementated at a later time.
After this, the threat of rain seemed to become more prominent so we broke up the outside effort.
After moving inside Jerry continued working on his end of things, I did some more researching on the watchdog …and then there was dinner. Which was excellent. @TODO: Add more expletives to describe how tasty diner was