The Story Box Build Meetup #1

Tonight’s meetup was a productive one. At the end of the meetup, we were astonished as to how simple the Story Box is. But keeping things simple is not an easy task. Especially at a hackerspace. For the past one year, we’ve been a motley crew of hackers, hobbyist, engineers and coders. We operate in an agile environment, and we do stuff as we see fit, or the way we like it. There’s no time frame, no reports, no documentation – just the freedom to build, tinker, make, hack and code the way we want. But in a competition, we have to have discipline. We got to have a plan, and we have to stick to it. And the most important rule of all: keep it simple, stupid.

Kakeman explaining TWI (Twin Wire Interface)

During today’s meeting we manage to list out the features that we want to implement. We’ve set milestone and timelines. We got rid of useless features. We drew some diagram. We even have a picture of how the final product will look like.

Mind map of the Story Box component and features

Due to its simplicity, the Story Box is actually pretty simple to do. All you need is an LCD shield, and an Arduino. Or you can have an LCD and a push button, wire it all up to the Arduino, and start coding. And because of its simplicity, The Story Box will be cheap to build as well. The next thing that we will do is to customized the PCB, and make the form factor smaller – enclosed in an acrylic box.

A sketch of the final product

To track progress and making sure that we follow the plan and not go overboard in terms of design and build, we’ve created a simple milestone chart. At the end of the week, we will have a working prototype built using LCD shield.

LCD Shield

and an Arduino with battery

Seeeduino

That’s all for now. In the next post, we’ll introduce our team. (This post is cross-posted to the element-14 community site)

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