Day 23: Project ICU!
Stage 1: Conceptualising the project
Yesterday I set myself an ambitious project. I’m calling it Project ICU. This is without doubt the biggest project I’ve worked on so far in my 3 months of tinkering full-time.
While energy is at an all-time high, my mind is still playing catch up. Dreaming of projects is way easier than implementing them. But since I’ve set myself an extremely tight deadline, there’s no time to waste. Today was mostly spent conceptualising.
Objectives
I started with the big picture and re-stated the objectives of Project ICU, crafted as user stories:
- Visitors can press and hear that they have pressed the doorbell.
- I can view a live stream of the space just outside my home by the main door from within my home office.
- Still images will be uploaded to a cloud/remote server wirelessly for safekeeping and archival.
- Email notification will be sent with an image attachment when a visitor presses the doorbell.
- (future: I can remotely trigger the camera to record video via my laptop)
Sketches
With the user stories nailed down (though not by any means fixed), I started sketching ideas of how the end product might look, drawing solely from the chaotic mix of technology and hardware knowledge in my mind.
Not long after that my brain went in multiple directions and I started to research alternatives to complement and transform the ideas I’ve just sketched.
Discovering what is possible
One moment I thought about the difference between an Arduino Yun implementation and a Raspberry Pi, and the next moment I was aware, I was already thinking about whether the cheapest camera might be a Raspberry Pi Camera module or a second-hand webcam that I can find on Carousell.
This is what I love most about working on a challenging project. It’s the perfect way to be reminded of just how little you know about anything, or more accurately, just how much there is to know and to explore. For a project like Project ICU, there are at least 10–20 feasible and cost-effective ways to execute and come up with a usable product.
I now have a few more ideas on implementation and will be spending a significant part of tomorrow to decide on one and order the components.
The Gulf of Execution
Between product conceptualisation and implementation is a massive gulf that requires great skill and awesome fortitude to overcome. Of course, I’m just making a total production run of 1 this time, so it’s a little easier. Still, conceptualising a project is really infinitely easier than actually putting parts together into a single, functional product. Only with practice does the gulf start to part, section by section. The goal is to become Moses.
Where people buy the good stuff
Top 3 online retailers hardware geeks in Singapore like to buy from, based on a local hardware interest group poll: (1) element14, (2) 12Geeks, (3) RS Components.
Seeing that I don’t have spare single-board computers lying around (though in 2016 this is perfectly possible in just about every maker’s home), I will soon need to open my wallet and buy one or two, along with some other components I don’t currently have.
I will share my shopping list when I place the order online over the next few days.
This post is part of my 30-day commitment to write about my journey learning technical stuff. If you learned something, please recommend it so that more of us can share our learning.
Posts are published to Getting Technical.
