Reflection

We enjoyed the brainstorming process at the beginning because we found out the opportunity gap in the communication issue between people separated by distance from one another. It was hard to start the project at the beginning because the technology we would like to use (muscle sensor or image recognition) was too difficult to implement in such a short period of time with our level of knowledge. After several ideations, we successfully found an alternative to the muscle sensor, flex sensor. We learned that sometimes the concept behind was more important than the form. Our current device is sufficient enough for us to convey the main idea.

Learnings

• We learned how to connect two devices - it turned out to be more simple than the team expected.
• We learned that the only way to know if something will work is by testing it over and over again v. trying everything all at once.
• We learned to test each individual challenge at once (segmenting each part of the process) instead of testing multiple things at one time or connecting two pieces of code too early in the process.

Challenges

• We faced a big challenge when coding for the pairing process. Both of our devices were able to publish events, but they couldn't subscribe to each other's events. We solved it by adding the specific ID of the paired device. 
• We had an issue with our devices subscribing to each others events so we specified that the events were public in particle.publish.
• We had trouble with the dispensing mechanism jamming when candy flowed out of the device. We iterated the design a few times so that this problem was resolved.
• We didn't find a good way to connect the flex sensor to the face. This meant that we had to hold the sensor to the face which was not a natural way to detect a smile.

Future Iterations

• In the future, we'd like to incorporate facial recognition technology (with a camera) so that the sensing process can be more natural.
• We'd like to explore different forms for our dispenser to see if it can encourage more connection and interaction with users.
• We thought of exploring ways to make the sensor encourage fun and play with the user who's dispensing the candy for the other person.