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Lab 09. Practice Tournament

This week, you will practice the tournament. Next week, you will demo the "works-like prototype" of your personal project. The week after, we run the tournament. Therefore, today, just prepare!

Pre-lab​

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Lab: Practice Tournament​

The tournament course should be built by now. There is nothing to be done except getting better at each challenge.

Personal project: Works-like Prototype​

Next week, you will demo your "works-like" prototype. The idea is that the prototype should indeed "work" but does not have to "work perfectly". Do not mistake this with "you can demo something that barely works". A works-like prototype is designed to be a proof-of-concept to ensure yourself, your classmates, and your TAs that your project is technically viable, but reduces a little bit of system complexity so that you can ensure a solid demonstration.

For example, if your personal project is a fire-suppression system that detects smoke, turns on a fan, finds a hot spot, and dumps water on the hot spot, each of these components absolutely must work separately in a works-like prototype. Your smoke detector must indeed detect smoke. Your fan must indeed evacuate smoke. Your temperature detector must indeed detect a hot spot. And your water pump must indeed pump water. What would not be required is that they do the whole thing at once, together, every time. That would be what your final demo must do.

Another way of thinking about it is that it's time for you to have your catastrophic failures now, while you still have a chance to recover. Many people have faith that they'll "figure it out later." You will not. Figure it out now so that it breaks and you can fix it. Or, if you can't fix it, you can revise your idea with your TA and find something that will work.

For example, if you thought that you absolutely must have a 4x4x4 LED matrix and now that you've built a 2x2x2 one, you realize that you just do not have enough power, you can ask yourself whether it makes sense conceptually, electrically, and programmatically to do what you wanted. If the answer is that the concept can change, great, change the concept. If the answer is that you have to just figure out the wiring, great, now you know the problem.