L I S A   L I

LET'S TALK ABOUT FAILURE >

 

“Success is most often achieved by those who don’t know that failure is inevitable.” - Coco Chanel

 

“Failure should be our teacher, not our undertaker. Failure is delay, not defeat. It is a temporary detour, not a dead end. Failure is something we can avoid only by saying nothing, doing nothing, and being nothing.” - Denis Waitley

 

This is what is written as some of the top 10 most powerful failure quotes as listed on Forbes :

(http://www.forbes.com/sites/ekaterinawalter/2013/12/30/30-powerful-quotes-on-failure/).

 

On the path to success, failure is inevitable, and this is true as things will fall apart and stray away from the path you want to take as that is just how life goes. During this process of making RUTE, I listed above the 'main' failures in this project but there is some that I would like to go in depth about.

 

Using these bew technologies by Adafruit and also Arduino, the technology can sometimes be finicky and at times, if one does not know the proper use of it, it wouldn't be able to reach its max potential in usage for the wearable platforms. The interaction between the hardware and the software was very tricky to attain as the battery would always die out with the neopixels as they take 5V to power, but the battery was only 3.7V but would reach a higher charge if it was fully powered. Using different mAH of batteries did help and substituting a 800mAH to a 1800mAH helped a lot. This enabled me to test out the co-ordinates with the Bluefruit LE and also the Vibe Motors. 

 

I also wired the hardware countless times with different mediums ranging from actual solid wire, to stripped wire, to the conductive thread, to the plastic coated conductive thread and also the conductive fabric. Let's just say, I tried them all. In the end, the one that worked best was a mix of the stripped wire, as it was much more flexible thann the solid wire and would 'feel' better in the garment, and also the plastic covered conductive thread alongside the conductive fabric to attach the negative/ground ends for both the buzzer and neopixel in the arm band.

 

In the end I learned that there would be lots of time that I wanted to just give up as it seemed that it would never work, but looking at the mistakes and the inconsistancies in a simple and single aspect helped. What I mean by this is that narrowing down a mistake to the simplest method would help pin point the error in either the hardware or software. It would seem redudant and tedious but nothing does come easy.