1.8 Documenting Your Work

Hand-drawn scribbles offer nice starting points, but often projects take twists and turns along the way that have to account for limited resources or hardware that just doesn’t work as planned. The final product may be vastly different from the original design. That’s why it’s so important to finish a project with accurate, clean, and concise documentation, especially if you plan to share your design with others.

Using applications like Fritzing can aid with the generation of clean, full-color wiring diagrams. Doing so will go a long way toward showing exactly how to wire up a project. Nothing is worse than seeing blurry, angled Flickr photos or YouTube videos of wires plugging into hard-to-see shield or breadboard pinholes as the primary means of documentation. Having those are nice supplementals, but any well-designed project should be accompanied by clear and easy-to-follow wiring illustrations.

Leave verbose comments in your code, even for the simple scripts and sketches. Not only will it help you and those you share the code with understand what various routines are doing, good comments will also put you back in the frame of mind you were in when writing the code in the first place. And if you share your code on various repository sites like Github and Sourceforge, well-commented code shows a greater level of professional polish that will gain you more respect among your peers.

With all these recommendations, keep in mind that the most important takeaway from the book’s projects is to have fun doing them. These rewarding experiences will encourage you to use these projects as starting points and infuse your own unique needs and design goals into them.

In the next chapter, we will review the hardware and software we will use and take into account the optimal configurations of each.