This week’s lesson speaks volumes to my experience with highlighting the critical path. So during my senior design course I encountered numerous obstacles which affected our critical path. I and my two friends were supposed to design a controller using a RS232 shield which would control a robotic arm called an iARM. In order to outline our entire project deadlines we used Microsoft project to keep track of deadlines and highlight our critical path. The Microsoft project calendar allowed us to see which assignments needed to get done on time due to the fact that it will affect another assignment. My group decided to set approximately 2 weeks to work on the RS232 shield so that we can begin our coding and testing. However, we ended up spending over a month on the assignment which pushed back our testing and software coding. We actual reached a critical point when we believed that we could not complete the proposed project on time. We had to analyze our critical path and come up with a way to still meet our deadlines with a new approach on controlling the iARM. To overcome the missed milestone we had to switch our control mechanism from using an RS232 shield to using MATLAB software on a desktop computer.