Halloween Results

The human mind has an incredible ability to rationalize a person’s own shortcomings. It’s only been a few days since my Halloween project was supposed to go live and I have already managed to convince myself that it wasn’t a total failure. I have always supported failure in engineering because most often better ideas and a firmer understanding are born from your shattered dreams. Still, in this instance I had high hopes for exploring new areas of microcontrollers and wireless communications. Instead, I ended up with the video you can see below.

Effectively, I created a series of blinking lights with some pumpkins on top. Was this the end result I was seeking? Yes, in a way. But instead of taking you through my thought process and throwing out some buzzwords to make myself feel better, I thought it would be better to show you how easily you can ignore total failure.

Original Thought: You didn’t get the ADC to work, implement dynamic timing adjustments, or get the microcontrollers to communicate wirelessly.

Rationalized Thought: I couldn’t get the watchdog timer working. I really had no chance to begin with.

Original: What does that say about your abilities that you couldn’t even get the watchdog timer working.

Rationalized: The requirements were too strict. I doubt many others in my positions would be able to get something working so quickly.

Original: You set the requirements for your own project.

Rationalized:

In all seriousness, I did pick up a few tricks doing this project that I can use going forward. I got some exposure to the new Microchip IDE, MPLABX. I figured out how to set pins in C using the free HI-TECH C compiler and the new (or what seem to be new to me) header files.