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"Failure is instructive. The person who really thinks learns quite as much from his failures as from his successes." - John Dewey
I have no idea who John Dewey is, but his quote is an excellent one. Although I would not call our project a failure by any means, it was obvious that we did not fulfill all the goals we had in mind when we started the project. However, I would also say for me personally that this I learned the most from this quarter's project than from the other two projects over the year. The following are our team's gems of wisdom that we have learned through many hours and sleepless nights of hard work.
-Allen
- Start the project early. Don't run out of time.
- Finish mechanical hardware design right away. Unlike code (and even circuit design), it will never really change much, and it needs to be done anyway. In addition, having the hardware ready is critical for testing some elements of code and circuits. Optimally, you would finish this the first weekend.
- Divide tasks up to work in parallel. The quarter is too short to have everyone work on everything. Only one person needs to know the iButton really well. Only one person needs to really know how the xBee radio works or the 74HC245 tranceiver, etc.
- When programming in PIC assembly, use .h files wisely. As soon as possible, identify elements of code that will be reused exactly in different microcontrollers. Put those function calls into .h files.
- If you have to pull an all-nighter at some point (we did), it means you've made a mistake along the way.
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