Some success... and some epic failure

This past Friday, Natalie and I were all set to go with installing our bench at an actual bus stop. We set out with our Arduino and speakers that we put in a nice little box to fit underneath the bench. We had decided to install at a smaller bus stop along Museum road, and we had gone out right after a class change, so there were not a whole lot of people out, which was perfect for installing. After asking an angry Asian girl on her cell phone to move off of our prospective bench and after some wrestling, we finally got everything into place and we supposedly set to go.

And that was when the problems began.

Our apparatus is brown, which matches the paint on the benches pretty closely. However, we did not take into account that some of the benches were not in good repair and that the paint was chipped off, making our apparatus much more conspicuous that we had originally hoped.

Natalie sat on the other bench about 15 feet away with her video camera hidden in her backpack while I sat on the bench with a voice recorder. I was sitting on the sensor, and... it wasn't going off, which was unfortunate, because some guy came and sat down on the bench next to me. When he sat down, he noticed the apparatus and started picking at it, so I tried to explain to him that it was a project, and that it wasn't working. I got up and checked the box with our equipment and noticed that the soldering on one of the battery terminals had broken. We quickly taped it up and fixed it.

Natalie resumed her position on the far bench while I sat on the sensor. This is when we realized we had another problem. The audio was playing, however, there was an error in the programming that caused the bench to continually play all the different clips while I was sitting on it and the contacts were touching. When I got up to tell Natalie, trouble arose...

In the five seconds that I had gotten off of the bench, some middle-aged dude came over to our bench to sit down. The apparatus came un-taped and rose up slightly. Instead of deciding not to sit on the bench, this guy proceeds to forcefully RIP our apparatus off of the bench, as if he were pulling some giant weed. Natalie and I watched in horror while this was happening, and we decided to pack up and call it a day.

The damage he did was not too extensive. One of our contacts became unglued and a little bit of the soldering had broken, however, we were able to repair the physical damage. We also went back to the code and fixed it.

So the main lesson that we learned was that our project is not public-proof. We are also trying to find a bus stop bench in better repair and plan to tape it down better next time. It is also important to supervise the project while it is on the bench. Unfortunately we didn't get the guy on film who destroyed our stuff, but I hope this account of it was amusing enough.

Needless to say, it was a failure, but we now have a few more considerations for our final project.