Gems of Wisdom
Project Planning:
- Try to design the project to be fun and intuitive for the user.
- Have some classmates try playing your game before the night of the demo so that you can see if anything is unintuitive and try to fix it.
- Keep the project simple.
- Come together as a team to make sure you are on the same page, and then divide and conquer.
- Make sure that any moving parts that people will interact with are very mechanically robust.
- Make sure you have a common ground between the TIVA and the power supply.
- Try not to short power and ground on the lab power supply, but it's not the end of the world if you do. It just makes a loud popping noise, and then you need to put a new chip inside.
- Keep in mind that soldering takes a lot of time.
- Superglue works really well for connecting things.
- Start laser cutting as soon as possible. It will get busy.
- Design such that it is easy to access your circuitry in case any wires come loose. We left the back of our machine open, which made it very easy to access.
- If you have audio feedback during your game, it's a good idea to use headphones, since it's loud during the public presentations. However, make sure you use headphones, not earbuds, because people will be sharing them.
- Try to divide the code into distinct modules that can be independently debugged.
- Write the pseudo-code first.
- Write the code such that you can change the difficulty of the game and make other tweaks with software, not hardware.
- Save iterations of your code. It can help in debugging.