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Mario display
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The app
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The heavy lifting.
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Individual lighting
Rolls Royce is a pinnacle of automotive engineering, and the opportunity to work with them is mesmerizing. So when we were presented with an opportunity and a problem to work with, alongside resident engineers from Rolls Royce, it wasn't something we were going to let go.
Typically, the starlight is an additional luxury option when buying the car. Initially the starlight displays the positions of the stars for the day of your choosing. This means that someone could have the stars from the day of his birth or the marriage or whatever be displayed on the internal roof of the car. We as a team reinvented the star light roof and allowed the beholder to individually control each fiber on the roof. Which means that one can potentially display anything he/she likes. The possibilities are endless.
First of all we were able to map out our ideas clearly and were able to sync our thought patterns. After this Nicolas, our resident coding wizard, started working on a software that will be able to incorporate a number of designs for the displays. Martin and I started off with drilling holes into the starlight roof creating a 16 by 16 matrix. This meant we had to push 256 individual optic fibers through the roof panel. Next step in the process was to attach the Neopixel LED matrices into the optic fibers. This was all done while Nicolas was figuring out the software to be programmed. While martin was working on this roof panel, I was working on the android app that would enable us to control the star lighting remotely. After completion of our individual tasks, we had completed the software required to command the lighting system, the android app to control it and, the hardware was assembled by Martin and team.
I was sincerely unprepared for this event as I cannot code in any known computer language. Which meant i was the heavy liftings guy. Nicolas introduced me to the android app design software. After struggling for a while I was able to figure out the software. Martin being a 4th year Physicist was way more experienced with handling the electronics and the hardware side of the project. This made Nicolas and I a bit left behind. But Martin was super supportive and was giving out simple instructions to work with, making the development process smooth.
For participants of the first time, we were really excited about how the project turned out. There were tons of riveting moments during the development process, that made development process extremely fun. In our first run, we were able to incorporate a twinkle effect into the starlight which is one of our presets. Later through the evening and the night, we were able to add more features into the starlight.
For someone like me, I learnt a great deal about hardware design and about app development. Through the whole experience, we all learnt a great deal about ourselves in terms of strengths and weaknesses. We learnt to work with a team, and also how to compartmentalize our each individual areas of expertise.
Hopefully, this project is a gateway for us to work with Rolls Royce in the future. We were extremely humbled to have worked with such a sophisticated piece of engineering and hopefully, our Starlight v2.0 will be incorporated in a future version of Rolls Royce motorcars.
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