Tech Beyond the Myth¶
Experience¶
The first week of the course was a flashback to my time in Engineering School in Chile. I have had similar reverse engineering experiences and many times they did not go well. We started by choosing the biggest device, a printer with scanner and fax system. Our anxiety to start working made us not to listen to the instructions, and we plugged the printer and we could identify that the mechanical system to move the paper did not work. Just with that clue we started to disassemble the system, it was amazing! I was very impressed with all the systems inside, we had mechanical, power, electronics, years of engineering and study that allow us to have smarter, smaller printers with more functionality. It is very impressive how they match all the pieces, and how each piece is unique and probably not replaceable.
The system with which the printer recreates documents and images by ejecting ink through small holes at a very precise speed, location and volume, amazed me. Many people should think that the way a printer puts an image on paper is magic, and understanding how it works is a big step.
I also learned about the printer business, many times companies put chips inside the ink cartridges, and that way you can only use their products. Finally, it is revealing the low price for a printer that is actually very complex and has so many things, may be the reason about the excessive amount of plastic parts.
More reflections in our Forensic Report https://hackmd.io/IFpmoizIRRygTzq2N4Cxwg?both
We started the second week feeling very smart, because even though it took us a long time to disassemble our machine, we had a lot of parts and systems to develop our own machine. However, it was very hard for us to coordinate our work and make decisions. We had a lot of uncertain, we didn’t know what we could do and how to do it. We wasted a lot of time trying to experiment with different systems, different ideas, and we didn’t have enough knowledge. It reminded me of my traumatic experience years ago, when I was in engineering school, because many times we were challenged to use arduino and other tools, but we didn’t know how to use them.
The difference in that case is the accompaniment of the IAAC teachers. Here the professors know how to work with arduino, and they are able to recognize when an idea can be complex. When we had problems coding or with electronic systems, they knew how to solve it, and if they didn’t know, they knew how to find solutions. That made my experience not traumatic, unlike my previous experience.
I learned that many times your ideas are limited by your capabilities, and the relevance of always taking into account time and other resources. If we had thought about it earlier, maybe we wouldn’t have wasted so much time. Very late in the experience we were able to agree on a device, and then we defined the concept behind it. Even though everything worked and the framing between our narrative and our device was interesting, this came out in an improvised way, contrary to what methodologically needs to be done.
Our presentation
Our video https://drive.google.com/file/d/1K5mMJZvlZI5rtww_4yWLKlHhEq2S76j-/view?usp=share_link
