Our project evolved a lot over the course of the project’s development. We began thinking about how to have an ongoing conversation with ChatGPT, and decided on a CYOA mystical story-writing concept. However, after realizing the back-and-forth aspect of ChatGPT was technically out of scope for the project, we thought about how to scale back. Eventually, we landed on our current project state which is a “subverting-career-future-storytelling” device. Although a lot changed in the process, we retained: using ChatGPT in a madlibs prompt fashion and using color sensing to “magically” encode arbitrary tokens.

We also learned a lot through the technical development and making process. At first we thought the color sensor would be far more sensitive and so it was recommended we added a button to control the ON/OFF state of the color sensor so it wasn’t constantly reading. However, we realized that within our controlled box environment, the color sensor could be trained really accurately and there was no need for a color sensor.

Another notable technical challenge we encountered was with the printer printing dull pieces. After some research, we found the solution of switching from a 5v to 9v power source.