Reflections

Looking back, I definitely wish I had better acquainted myself with Arduino or other forms of embedded systems prior to this project. I would have liked to leverage the resources in the IDEATE physical computing lab as there were a lot of little items or tools I didn't think I would need until I did. Much of this project was done at home so I didn't really consider how much electronics supplies I would need to find on my own. 

Finding an online guide on SparkFun for translating Spotify album art to an LED matrix was such a lucky find as I was a little concerned about having to design an API on my own, but it definitely didn't provide all the information I needed as a beginner. There were many things that I had to teach myself or discover on my own (installing the correct Python/Arduino libraries, figuring out the right API lingo to Google, etc). I would say approximately half of this project was spent Googling things and not actually coding, which is understandable as a beginner but in the future I'd love to spend more time exploring the capabilities of the LED matrix and not feel as pressured to get things right the first time around.

In the future I would have liked to design a full interface or app on your phone where you could toggle the fidelity of the bits (go from 32bit to 8bit). This could make viewing the art more like a game where you could guess the different album covers.