Week 12: April 10, 2023 – April 16, 2023

Blog entry by Damian Xie

Summary of the week: We started new documentation of Arduino; Lauren finished all Arduino boxes (sensor kits). Damian finished the shooting of our project trailer footage. Our faculty consultant Shirley Saldamarco came to our room and reviewed all things of our project, she gave us a lot of useful suggestion. Randi and Yanyan Worked really hard on rewriting all code of our Arduino functions to fix bugs that we had. We also imported all audio files manually (93 files). Felicia have done the new iteration of our UI. Programmer fixed bugs including Input/output UI frozen, animation aliasing. Last but not least, we celebrated CMU Carnival together!

New Arduino documentation

Lori, Lauren and Randi are rewriting the hardware introduction section of our project documentation, where we detail how the Arduino connection is installed and how the associated Uduino code is imported into the new file, in order to ensure that if someone were to continue developing our existing project content, they could simply skip the basic learning section of the tool framework.

Arduino boxes (sensor kits)

To save our clients as much time as possible on the hardware installation part, I prefabricated some of the possible sensors and encapsulated the built-in circuitry with the hardware already connected in a small box we made with laser cutting. If clients have any questions, they can find the index directly, and if they want to make more Sensor Kits in the future, they can refer to our existing production process.

Shoot our project trailer footage

This week we had to finish the final part of our website content, the filming and editing of our project trailer and uploading it to the website, which marks the end of the semester, and it was great to work with everyone to finish the whole film.

Feedback from the faculty consultant

Shirley came to our project room this Wednesday and after experiencing our tools and the existing interactive narrative experience gave us the following suggestions:

1. make sure that high school students are capable enough to understand the functionality of our tool and use it to produce the interactive storytelling content we need.
2. make sure all the features are complete and fix the existing bugs.
3. next Wednesday she wants to come and use the tool herself, if she can learn to use it as a beginner then it proves to be suitable for her.

Bugs fixing

Randi and Yanyan worked very hard this week on fixing bugs in the existing program, they worked almost the whole week (including weekends) and the main bugs fixed are as follows:

• Animation aliasing
• Input/output UI frozen

Implement UI and import audio files in unity

Felicia completed a new iteration of the UI during a visit to New York, and Randi brought the UI interactions to fruition.

CMU Carnival

The annual CMU Carnival has begun and our group had a great time together!

All in all, we’ve been enjoying the school carnival this week and working hard to get ready for the soft opening next Monday, hopefully with good results!