Hi I am Eduardo and I am a junior at Eastwood Academy. I’m building a watch app for the pebble that basically assists on finding somewhere to eat using Google Maps and your current location.
My Reflection
The six weeks that I spent in BlueStamp was definitely worth it, it was definitely a much needed experience for me. A lot of people always talk about engineering and how it’s a great profession but no one really ever goes into detail on what an engineer actually does and BlueStamp definitely provides that information. Besides providing information it also provides the experience and skills someone will need in a career in engineering (I had never even heard of soldering before I came here). Another great aspect in the program was the self-dependent work ethic the program provides, I think that help us to enter into the mentality of an engineer. This forced me to really expand my way of thinking and allowed me to fathom some of the tougher concepts in my project. My project in particular was really rigorous for me considering that I had no experience with coding in C, but I’m really glad I challenged myself and i wouldn’t have chosen any other project. Overall I had a great experience and if I could go back in time I wouldn’t have chosen to spent these six weeks of my summer any other way, thank you BlueStamp.
My Final Video
My project was a watch app that locates different restaurants based on ratings convenience. This split up into 20 different categories pre-loaded by me. It was really gratifying when it worked for the first time, especially after all the challenges I had with learning and understanding the code language.
Hints and Tips
- One thing I really recommend for you to do is look at other codes any code and just run it. (A
- good website for this was Github.com)
- When you can’t compile go to the build log and the letters in red are the problem.
- Make sure the codes you draw from are compatible with the pebble software (not all of them are).
- It would be helpful to study C before starting the program or have some background with coding.
- I notice that most of my problems happened towards the end of my project, so expect that.
My Code and Bill of Materials
FoodFinder Code / foodfinder.c
My First Milestone
My first milestone was loading and modifying the “helloworld.c” program on to the pebble watch. This was my first successful upload to the pebble watch, giving me more exposure to the way the pebble watch actually works. The most difficult part was configuring the watch to the software to upload through a cloud.
Car Sensor Starter Project
The basic functions of a car sensor aren’t very complicated, the car sensor is traditionally used to aid for parking. Still there are other uses for it, especially in robotics. The car sensor has two sensors on one board and a speaker on the other and through a series of resistors, diodes, capacitors, and wires a message is send through both the boards when the sensor senses something near, leading to the speaker producing noise to warn us. Other tools used for this project were ICs, IC sockets, wires, and screw connectors (all included in the kit except for the wires). This project involved a lot of soldering, and the hardest part of that is figuring out where everything goes. Soldering is a great skill to know throughout my short time here it has been a big part of my experience. I did had a few problems with soldering, I had soldered one of the IC sockets backwards.The problem was fairly simple to fix though, once I found out that was the problem. Of course I had some help form our instructors but that did show that in anything there are mistakes and you need to be able to ask for help. This project also showed me independence because BlueStamp i s self based program it was just me and my project and again that showed independence.
