Talk:Holograms at Home

Project Review

Strengths

• It is important that the team has recognized the difficulty of managing wires around moving components.
• Gantt Chart is segmented in a way that makes it easy to understand the main stages of the project.

Weaknesses

The proposal is shallow, in the sense that it fails to identify the main thrusts in this project. For example:

• The Gantt chart severely underestimates the time necessary to get a working and robust mechanical design that has the following properties:
  1. It is balanced (has a center of mass around the desired axis) even after all the LEDs, wires, batteries, and electronic boards are mounted.
  2. Can firmly hold a collection of LEDs.
  3. Enables visual effects even though the LEDs considered in the budget shine light in a single direction.
  4. Can route all the wires so they don't fly away due to centripetal force.
• Assuming that the device will have a significant number of LEDs (no comment is made in the proposal), an electronic circuit will be necessary to connect those LEDs to the Arduino board. The connection will likely have to be multiplexed, hence extra integrated circuits will be needed.
• An algorithm to synchronize the lights with the motor needs to be developed. This is not just "program the device [...]", but also understand the real-time issues associated to this algorithm.

Also, as someone who has had his fair share of problems and heartbreak dealing with motors,

• A one sentence overview does not provide enough detail and should be longer. Since the overview mentions "[...] a spinning LED [...]", my first impression was that the device consisted of a single LED.
• There is overlap between the objectives and the challenges, almost word for word in a couple places. The objectives should read more like goals while the challenges should read more like a list of potential problems.
• Gantt Chart image should be cropped to include only the chart itself. Also, the font in the chart is minuscule.
• TA not included as team member
• There is no mention on how the motor angle will be measured.
• The motor should be selected with great care, as should the motor controller. There is no reason to assume that they will be provided, hence they must be included in your budget.
• It is unclear if AA batteries are capable of providing enough power to move the whole contraption, since the contraption itself has not been even sketched yet.

Humberto 01:05, 7 February 2017 (CST)