03 Happy Halloween from Lord Voldemort

That's right, I made a life size Voldemort animatronic

Happy Halloween! I know it’s a little late but after finishing my Halloween project (click here to see it), I can’t stop thinking about all the fun I had, it’s like I never want Halloween to end. But unfortunately, it already has. So it’s time for reflection!

This project was my first dip into the waters of project building and design on a larger scale. In my past engineering classes, we’ve built many projects before but nothing this big or ambitious. I know it was mostly my fault for planning such an ambitious project, we barely had enough time to complete it. However, at the very last second, we brought everything together! That was one of the highlights of my project, being able to see the complete product before me. Another highlight was finding all the PVC pipes to use at the beginning of our project. They became the main building pieces and our literal project backbone. The sturdiness and round shape of them definitely helped our project succeed.

Though there were many highlights, we also had a few downfalls throughout our project building. One thing that could’ve gone better was my group’s time management. In the beginning, it took us some time to get all our materials and pieces together. We didn’t know if we wanted to use a mannequin or wood; we didn’t even know where to find a mannequin, let alone a mannequin within our budget. Then, we struggled with finding a cloak for our Voldemort and a baby doll as our victim. With these weeks lost, the last few weeks were quite rushed and became very stressful as we raced to finish before the deadline. Every minute was valuable, even the minutes before the showcase when I was re-coding the robot, making sure the numbers were enough to power the motor. However, as I mentioned before, we pulled everything together at the last minute and ended up with an amazing project I couldn’t be more proud of.

Now that this “warm-up project” is out of the way, we will be starting our main capstone project in a few days. I am beyond excited but after this Halloween project, it’ll be a little harder than expected. Instead of all this random building and playing with power tools (not actually playing with them, I almost cut my finger off once, I don’t want to do that again) like I initially planned, I understand the process more and all the documentation I’ll have to keep track of. Going into this capstone project, the biggest piece of advice I can give myself is to communicate deadlines and plans to my teammates. After this mini project, I’ve realized that it’s better to hit the ground running. This way, we can get out materials faster, establish jobs earlier on, and as a result, finish our projects sooner.

With that piece of advice, this blog post has come to an end. I hope you enjoyed it! Bye bye now.