Funny title pictures aside, these two weeks were rough. I had a family emergency at the beginning of Week 11 that took me out of town/out of commission for a week and a half, and these were the two weeks I was the most worried about since I have no coding experience. Since I was trying to make up a lot of work in my other classes as well, I knew I wasn't going to be able to get these weeks done but I wanted to at least get something down. Since the only code I've successfully executed so far is the code to make the hello.echo blink, I wanted to make some kind of documented process/learning.
My initial goal was to write an interface with the hello.echo board that would count the number of times that I pressed the button. I heard that Python was a good language to use to take advantage of py.serial, so I went ahead and dove in.
Or tried to, at least. I downloaded Python and Python libraries using Anaconda and tried to find example/similar looking code. I was able to find a couple examples from previous years and around the internet, but my lack of understanding of syntax as well as programming logic in general made it tough for me to get anything out of it. I then proceeded to try to teach myself Python, digging through online resources like CodeAcademy and 6.001 on OCW. At this point, however, I had spent well over 20 hours in one trying to get enough base knowledge just to do this project, not even starting the networking. When I hit the point that I was sacrificing my other work to try to get something together, I decided to just let these weeks be. I don't really know how to document my process for these weeks and I understand that I probably won't get credit for them, but I had to draw a line at some point so I could catch up in the rest of my classes.