Crest Team

Our Process

After reflecting on the process of completing our project this quarter, we came to a number of valuable conclusions.  In general, we feel our project was a success.  We managed to successfully fulfill most of the functions that we wanted our project to have.  We were able to communicate between the badges and the wands via Infra-red, and we also utilized accelerometers and motion detection to emulate the process of casting a spell.  However, we did run into a number of difficulties along the way.  We initially wanted to have a couple of micro-servo motors that would pop up flags every time a player scored.  However, implementing servo motors turned out to be very difficult.  The servo motors produce a lot of "noise", noise that directly interferes with xBee communication.  We spent hours trying to troubleshoot why our xBees were not communicating properly to no avail.  It was not until we removed all servo code that our xBees started functioning the way we wanted them to.  We also had a lot of difficultly implementing the IR.  At first, we thought that we could use one IR emitter to stimulate, individually, 5 separate IR receivers.  After experimenting, we learned that IR is not as accurate as we initially thought.  We found that we could not stimulate just one IR receiver, because each receiver on a player's body is in the field of stimulation for the single IR emitter.  To solve this issue, we used only one IR emitter and one IR receiver.  We realized that we would have to forgo pinpoint hit detection for a singularized hit detection system.  Through all of the successes and failures that came along with completing this project, we truly feel that every minute of the process was valuable.  In the work place, not everything goes your way, especially when you have six different people with six different perspectives all creating the same deliverable.  While completing this project, we gained experience with working with people who are not the exactly the same and with working through failures and difficulties, which are features that make an excellent team-member.