In truth I hit loads of snags along the way – it is the nature of programming to have things fall over. Searching for the error online often provides a fix, but there were several times when I reached the outer limits of my own technical capabilities. This is where being part of a community of coders helps. I was amazed at how knowledgeable others are and how deep their understanding of what is going on.
For example, I needed to refresh the screen with cat pictures, but the Raspberry Pi couldn’t cope – it ran out of memory and the refresh rate got slower and slower. I thought this must be an absolute limit of the Raspberry Pi and that I would need to use something more powerful to run the code, but it turned out that I just needed to empty the trash. Including a line to explicitly clear down the memory after every cat display solved my problems.
This may sound fairly straightforward (and in some ways it was) but things are only ever easy if you know the answer; otherwise, minutes can turn into hours and hours into days whilst trying to solve what seems to be a trivial problem.
The alternative would be to pay someone to code everything for me; and this is tempting, except that (a) I don’t have the money and (b) I think it is important to get to grips with some of the code myself. Some of the best outcomes I have created have come from unexpected glitches during my search for a solution.
