Project 1 Reflection

I thought our project turned out really well considering all of the bumps in the road we had along the way. I really enjoyed working with the LED matrix's, even though at first I thought they were going to be a nightmare.

Some things we need to think about further with this project are the interface of the 'box' and our word choice for the LED. For the interface of the box, would you know to talk into it? The text was helpful, but I still think the interface of the box needs help. I think the only reason why everyone in the class knew to go up and speak into it was because they knew what our project was and saw us doing it. An actual microphone could be an option. Another option that was mentioned was the interface of an old style telephone you would talk into.

Another response that I heard often was that it seemed to be a kind of insult box. The initial display text definitely needed some work. The whole time we thought we were going to be limited to a max of like… 50 characters total amongst all our words because of the limitation with the code and the arduino's memory. Sunday night I had a breakthrough with the code and I was able to alter it so we could use pretty much as many words and sayings as we wanted. Monday morning before the critique we were thinking of all the extra words to say, so that was kind of on the fly. We could have definitely put more thought into the words being displayed.

Our grammar was also mentioned, why we didn't use periods. Well honestly, our grammar wasn't considered at the time, but I think it is really something that we should have looked at. The way it turned out, we didn't have any periods on our sentences, and honestly I liked how that mistakenly turned out. I think it left the viewer waiting for more, for the end.

People seemed to use the device as more of a 'yell box' or scream box rather than actually speaking words into it. I think this goes back to the interface of the box. If the interface was more inviting of words rather than screams or yells. I am not sure if I am more interested in a scream device or a communication device, I have heard of scream boxes before that you are supposed to vent frustration into. Scream boxes seem kind of cliché. It is interesting to think of a scream box that would respond to your levels of screams with insults. They are definitely something worth expanding upon.

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