Week 13

It’s almost the trade show!!!

I’m super excited to show off our project. Hopefully people like it! We’ve been working really hard on it all year, so hopefully people understand what we’ve made, why we’ve made it, and why it was worth making.

I’m a little nervous about the trade show, and a lot nervous about the final presentation. We’ve been updating our slides from the progress presentation in the middle of the year, and trying to make sure we’ve covered everything in the slide show, as well as making sure everything is ready to be burned to DVD and handed in.

I can’t believe it’s almost over! What a year.

Week 12

I can’t believe this week is already over!

I didn’t do much this week, but Nathan’s been working on the video, and it looks really cool. I think it’ll be awesome when we have it looping at the trade show, it’ll really help people understand what our project is without us having to do the spiel to literally every person who walks past.

Week 11 part 2

Today we finalised and printed our poster! Woo!

It’s taken ages to get it to a point where we’re all really happy with it, but I think it looks cool. We sent it to Luke earlier today to get some final feedback on it, and after some final adjustments we think it’ll look really good at the trade show.

I’m really excited that I’ve been able to head this part of the project. I’m pretty experienced with photoshop, so once we’d really worked out what we wanted, it didn’t take me long to make the draft (posted last week). Then it was just a matter of finding something for the background that really looked like a good weld object. We took a lot of photos of random metal items on random backgrounds (like workbenches, etc), but this constructed item on the project lab desk ended up looking the best. It took some photoshop editing to make it come out like this (there were outlets and plugs on the wall that were removed, the desk was cleaned up of smudges and dirt, and I added some extra “welding sparks” that didn’t come out too great in the screenshot of the robot in action.

And after all that…it looks really good! We’re really trucking along, so I’m looking forward to the trade show, and the video that Nathan’s been working on.

Week 11

Okay…wow. The poster has gone through a lot of changes! I think we’re getting close to something good, though!

no dot points:

no border:

the real robot at last!

with an actual background, and black borders to separate the image from the poster: (note the multi-coloured top logo! I’m really happy with how that looks, I think it really brings together our main colours)

We’re going in as a team tomorrow to finish it off and get it printed, so I’ll update again tomorrow with what we ended up with!

Week 10

I’ve finally knocked over enough other assignments to really feel like I can get back on top of our project, and this week I’ve really been focused on the poster. We had a team meeting this week where we discussed the poster at length, and I think I finally have a really good idea for how it should look. It’ll take some work to finish off, but here’s where we’re starting:

Obviously we need a real image of the virtual robot working on a real job to go in the middle there, but I like the flavour text, and I think it’s a good idea for us to have the logos at the bottom to show whose programs/hardware/robots we’ve been using. Plus I really want to feature our theme colour (bright orange) quite a lot in the poster. I thought about having an orange background (and even tried it out), but it didn’t look great against the image, and I think it might be too orange (if such a thing even exists!)

Week 8

We had a progress meeting this week, and I think it went pretty well!

I haven’t been working on the poster much (way too busy with other uni work at the moment), but the other guys have been working on storyboarding for the video, which is really exciting. I can’t wait to see it!

Week 6

We had a really good meeting with Koren this week, where we really nailed down how we might be able to better display our project at the trade show.

I haven’t really been working on the poster, although I’ve been trying to find some appropriate sample images to use for my ideas to see if they look OK.

Week 5

This week I’ve started doing some thumbnails for our group’s poster that we’ll be displaying at the trade show. We’ve brainstormed as a group about the kind of “image” that we want to portray; we want to portray the idea of being able to use our product at home or “on the go”, instead of having to go into the office and have to go through all the setup with the robots to set up and test a welding project. I also really wanted to get across the idea of “augmented” reality; the fact that you can see both reality and a virtual image at the same time.

I sketched up a bunch of images that, hopefully, get across both of those ideas (these are the best ones, I think):

I’m thinking the “virtual” elements in the poster will be drawn in the same orange that we use for our logo, both for aesthetic reasons and also to make it clear that the virtual robot is the core element of our product. I might also edit the Meta glasses the operator in the poster is wearing to add a little orange light, or something, to tie that in with the robot as well. I want a viewer to be able to look at it and pretty easily understand it without needing us to clarify, or without needing extra text on the poster. For text, I’m thinking we only really want our product name + logo at the top in our orange colour, and then maybe our names and our website’s URL at the bottom in smaller text.

Hopefully this week or next I’ll be able to start mocking up some of these thumbnails in photoshop with stock images, to see which ones work best. Then I can take some photos of someone wearing the glasses and finish it off.

Week 4 part 2

Today I emailed the Unity package of my keyboard shortcuts off to be incorporated into our project, and….(drumroll, please)…they work! They actually turned out to be super easy to code up, after all that effort. We’re still having some issues with saving/loading jobs, so my shortcuts are hardcoded for those tasks (instead of pressing “L” to bring up all the jobs, and then a number that refers to one of the jobs, and then that job loading, you press “L”, and then “1”, and it loads the first job…the only job. Pressing “2” does nothing). Once we have that sorted out, I can get back into it; it shouldn’t be too hard.

I might work on it before then, anyway; it should be pretty easy to mock up a save/load system (like maybe when the program starts up, it just adds the same job a random amount of times (min = 2, max = 5, or something), and then I can work out how to get the keyboard shortcuts working procedurally. It’s probably a good idea for me to do this now – or soon, anyway – so we don’t have the kind of issue where we get saving/loading working totally right…five minutes before the tradeshow, and there’s no time to do shortcuts.

Week 4

This week has already been kind of a pain…and it’s only Monday.

Last week I volunteered to code up some keyboard shortcuts for the menus in our project, as it’s a total pain to use the augmented reality menu. It’s hard to get your hand totally in the right place to trigger each menu option, and a user would get sick of it very quickly. It looks cool in the movies when Iron Man touches all the options…but I’m sure once all his friends go home, he pulls out a keyboard. In our project, you can change a lot about each point in a welding job; its value on the X, Y and Z axes, and its scale, and it takes a few button presses to get to that – first you need to select the edit button, and the point to be edited. Then to edit a point, you press a + or a – button next to the value you want to change. Which is fine if you only want to change one thing, but if you had a lot of changes to make, it would be a pain.

So: keyboard shortcuts! The user will be at their computer anyway, so we might as well make use of it for advanced users or users with a lot of tasks to get through. Sounds easy enough, just get unity to respond to certain keypresses by calling certain menu functions. All the code is already there, I just need to hook it up.

Well…it would be useful if I could get the project to work on my computer. After a few days of troubleshooting, I finally realised I have the wrong version of Unity. So now I have to re-download and install that, and then get the project again.

So far this “simple” task has already taken about a week. Fingers crossed once I actually get the project open and running in Unity on my computer, the task itself will be as easy as I hope it will be…!