The Secret is Shiny-ness

With the Blake project nearing its end, one of the few major things left to do (apart from finalising and doing a final debug on everything) is to improve the look of the final product. Onward to many pictures, and then a bit of explanation:

The cars, a few versions after the last posted about. Now a full MDF chassis (which is a good thing?), removable side facades and a frame to allow for the easy mounting of electronic components. They have a really low track clearance so look hilarious going around corners.

A section of the new double layer track, construction still in progress. The track will be built mostly from clear perspex to make it look futuristic. It also has several functional purposes, the stacking of the two rails means we can have two track paths of equal length without resorting to a figure of eight design, making races fair while also keeping down the workload for the radar algorithms. It also ensures that our speed traps are only able to detect a specific car (the one on their rail), reducing their workload too.

The base station GUI in its start up state. It allows us to quickly change some of the track functionality (like turning the radar on and off), while also displaying some few properties of the system, such as which transmitting nodes have recently transmitted, and therefore whether they may have crashed. The black box at the bottom the window displays a log a all communications sent and received as the program operates useful for when trying to explain how our wireless network handles information.

This final push is mainly to improve the outreach value of the project, with three main aims.

Firstly we want to make the job of our presenters easier. By splitting up the different elements of the system, making them obviously discrete, the presenter will be able to walk through different parts of the system, and able to tailor their focus to the interests of their audience. For example, by adding a GUI to the base station we can remove the need for a demonstrator to start discussing the depths of the Python code, unless this is what their audience wants.

Secondly the final product needs to appeal to onlookers or even casual passers by, to make them curious about the track and its race cars. By making the track look awesome, hopefully we can provoke questions like: 'how does that bit work??', which is exactly what any presenter wants to hear as it allows them to jump straight into explanations and questions without having to focus to much on attracting people to talk to in the first place.

Finally we want to make the track and associated devices appear finished as an unfinished product will struggle to establish credibility for onlookers. This will ensure that potential audiences take the track and cars seriously and thus able to understand the elements of electrical and electronic engineering being displayed, rather than simply viewing it as a cool gadget thrown together but with no obvious value.

Hopefully when we are done in X units of time the project will end with something that can be used to help outreach for electrical and electronic engineering. While getting everything working is vital for doing this, improving the look of the final product is also necessary to be successful.