Some time ago I posted about our engineering project, here’s the (almost) finished result:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XqjbyHlYxAo

This video gives you the general idea of the project. The final product was more polished and had additional features. During the demo day quite a few people were impressed by the fact we used an accelerometer in combination with motors, a microphone, a SIPO and PWM.

People could vote for one of the 15 teams and we ended up being third, so all in all not a bad result!

One thing we’ve learned is to be not too ambitious with a project. It took quite a while to understand the different components and make them work decently. We’ve ran out of time at the end and so not everything was as we wanted it to be.

This time it was more serious and in the end we all gained a lot of experience in programming an actual microcontroller (a Microchip PIC18F2553) and using ‘real life’ electronic components. However, it was unfortunate that the part on the PIC was handled in the lectures only these last two weeks so we had to figure out a lot by ourselves. This proved somewhat challenging because we’ve learned reading and completely understanding a datasheet are two completely different things!