When working on the creation of a seven degree of freedom impedance controller for an iARM my project team encountered many delays due to a critical path. The controller was initially expected to be controlled using an RS232 shield with an Arduino Mega which would communicate between the iARM and the controller. This was not considered a critical path until we began to realize that the iARM was not receiving information from the RS232 shield but the shield was communicating with the Arduino Mega. Within the initial phase we planned to work on the RS232 shield within the month of October and move on to evaluating our design in November. However, by the end of October we were unable to create communication between the iARM and RS232 shield. My project team began to realize that we would not be able to meet our deadlines if we continued to try to figure out why the RS232 shield was not communicating with the iARM. So in the month of November instead of evaluating out prototype we switched our software and had to update all of our documents without utilizing the RS232 shield within our mechanical, electrical and software designs. A simple task of communicating between an RS232 shield and iARM which was supposed to take a month ended up setting us back for an entire month and caused us to redesign our entire project. We came to realize that if we spent more time researching the compatibility between an RS232 shield and iARM, we would have save so much time and money further on in the developing stages of the prototype.