The end!

By Sara Baracchini August 5, 2016 Edition CHIC 2015-2016Discover Aimo project

Hello everyone!

This trip has now come to an end, and let’s look at what we have done during the last days!

Well, during our last (full) day in Shenzhen, we worked again on the prototypes! The teams were a little bit everywhere: some of us were at the “new old” Seeed’s offices, some of us were at the “new new” offices and maybe a few of us stayed at the hotel (but id they did, not for long anyway). You can see on the pictures below how the “new new” offices look like (pretty nice right!):

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During this day, everyone’s concern and goal was to have something functioning to present at the end of the day to the television (!), to the professors, and to ourselves obiously! It was a very stressful day and everyone was in a rush! Fortunately, all the teams got their 3D printed parts the day before at the hotel and so were able to work on it. So for some of us, it was filing and sanding the components in order to make them fit how they were supposed to, for some others it was to try to make all the electronical components in the prototype, for others it was working on the software, etc. Here are some pictures about our busy day:

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As I mentionned before, the television, the CCTV, was with us this day! They captured us working on our prototypes and interviews a few people! They interviewed the professors to have a sense of their feeling during this adventure, they interviewed students about how they have lived this experience and also, at the end of the day, each team was captured while making a brief presentation of our respective devices, showing what was finally working!

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And at the end of the day, all the teams managed to have a functioning prototype (YAY!). Well, of course not all of us had all of our functionalities working properly and the devices that we had probably won’t look like the final product (because of the materials for example), but, we had something functioning, something to show! And I have to tell you that when you see that your team and you have managed to get to this in the end, you (almost) forget all the sweat and the late nights of work! What an achievement and great feeling!

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I am sure that all the teams are going to keep working on their products until we get to a first “real” device! And our next (and final) steps are the presentation in September at EPFL and ECAL and I look forward to seeing what all of the products are going to look like then! So don’t worry, you’ll get more pictures about the final products (I hope!).

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In the evening, after a very busy day, we went all together to the restaurant to eat some Beijing duck (after Yumeng showed us how it worked!) and it was really good!!! We had the last speeches (I almost shed a tear) and then we went out for our last beers all together!

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The next morning, some of us took the plane back to Switzerland, some missed it, and some stayed in China in order to keep exploring the country! Here are some pictures of the group that stayed:

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To conclude, I must say that this trip and this whole experience was amazing! We all learned a lot about our own field of studies, about other fields (for me, it was electronical engineering!), about project management, about China, and so many other things. And most of all, I think that I’m safe when I say that we all had a lot of fun and we met great people during this adventure!