We started by brainstorming what we wanted to build, and found we were all interested in making something that had to do with nature. 
We also talked extensively about our lives in the New York City and found intercultural communication is very interesting. We decided to build a garden of flowers and have them represent us, the newcomers of the Big Apple. 
Wiring the LEDs to our breadboard was risky in that the wire could get out of the connection points. We tried the solderable ones. 
The solderable boards were pretty hard to manage in our case...Eventually we ended up using the most common breadboard and hot-glued all the wires to the points. 
Prototyping and testing the distance sensor. It worked well! 
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We spent a lot of time trying to figure out the difference between Serial.write and Serial.print and finally figured out how to control the sound through data sent from the serial port. 
We powered the LEDs with different Output pins so that they get enough voltage to light up. To do that, we need to give the wiring some order to make it clear for us which LEDs go to which pin. 
Markers for the LEDs, so that we know which ones belong to which tribe. 
Maria suggested we use purple wires. I thought it was a great idea for this project. I soldered the LEDs to these wires and then put shrink tubes on each to prevent unintended wire contact and short circuit. 
This is the ultrasonic distance sensor we used. We compared different distance sensors before deciding to use this one. It came with a pretty precise and wide sense range. 
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