I don’t think we talk about failure enough. Sure, everyone says “you have to fail, it is the best way to learn” but not one likes to talk about it.<\/p>\n
I thought about sharing a big failure story but I think, in the end, I’m not going to because it is also sad.<\/p>\n
Still, I can’t just close this and tuck it into my drafts folder (that is a scary and slightly hilarious place) so I’ll tell you about this thing I thought “I’ll just hack that together while I’ve got free time”.<\/p>\n
I made those motor boards (and I’m not ready to launch myself in to working on my posture shirt (though I probably should)). And I’m waiting for more hardware to make another ayok widget. But I do have the little dog stuffed animal, now with an RGB LED.<\/p>\n
What if it could snore? Or sort of breath? Or have a heartbeat?\u00a0Not for the ayok feature, just because it can be really comforting to be near something that is alive-ish and has no expectations. (I have real dogs, they have expectations. And my beagle thinks I’m stupid so that really helps my ego.)<\/p>\n
Anyway, I got the idea, have the hardware, and thought it would make a cute little demo. \u00a0I also have this thought\u00a0of trying to use the coin cells to con my hand into believing it touched something (briefly).<\/p>\n
I went for the Arduino so I could post it on github, write about it a bit. I had a slight plan to show the result to someone, but not a solid thing.<\/p>\n
I coded up a little command interpreter for Arduino’s serial port. Then I played with PWM, discovering that the timer configuration is annoyingly nontrivial. I was surprised as Electric Imp and mbed both hide the guts of PWM. I read timer sections of the ATmega328 datasheet, remembering how much I prefer other companies’ method of information organization.<\/p>\n
I made commands for changing the duty cycle and the frequency. I make a little script parser so I could have a snore be inhale, snork, pause, exhale, pause, changing the duty cycle and frequency for each stage.<\/p>\n
But it didn’t work that well. The snore wasn’t all that consistent and the code freaked out sometimes. I fixed the freak-out by modifying my PWM code to use the overflow interrupt to reload the registers. But it still wasn’t good.<\/p>\n
And then my computer’s screen started acting really strangely, strangely in time with the PWM going on and off. I had the Arduino and motor board powered from my USB port. \u00a0The motor only takes ~0.5A and the Arduino isn’t a big load. Maybe it was just how dirty the power got. Or maybe it was completely unrelated.<\/p>\n
That was the last straw. My results weren’t good. The processor was more annoying to use than I expected. My end goal is fuzzy (and not in a cute-fuzzy sort of way).<\/p>\n
Motivating myself to do these projects requires me to like the project. Sure, there were times when the ayok widget was less than fun, debugging can be a grind. But this was just a mess all over. The most fun I had was with the command line parser.<\/p>\n
I could persist through this, maybe make something I don’t hate. Probably switch to an mbed to drive it, use a USB hub or external power, maybe get a selection of small motors. But I don’t really want to.<\/p>\n
The failure here is not in stopping. The failure is that I’m not learning anything.<\/p>\n
I know that with the right motor and PWM tuning I can get snoring working (I’ve done it before). I’m confident heartbeat isn’t tough. And I’m pretty sure I won’t be able to make a determination on my haptic hand-touching-wall thing because it won’t work and I won’t know whether to blame the mounting or\u00a0the code or the unreality of the situation.<\/p>\n
So, it is a little fail\u00a0and, accordingly, a\u00a0little depressing.<\/p>\n