Slightly behind schedule on creating the SCRUD System as I was busy with big assignment in 18341. Have some slack time left next week for the task, so aiming for not having to reschedule things.

• Filled out multiple order forms for the different types of parts that are going currently going to be used for the filter. Items like mics, jack breakouts, different types of splitters, and etc. Waiting for the parts to be delivered. Also, looked into the type of resistors and capacitors to use for the filter circuit.
• The schedule is on progress
• For the upcoming week, planning on building a filter circuit and using an oscilloscope to test that the circuit filters within the desired range of approximately 40Hz – 14kHz

• Decide to switch microphone to be used in system with a different microphone. The change was made because the new mic is battery powered and the old mic for the system was not. Having a mic with its own more source gives one less thing to worry about.
• Currently, the plan is slighlty behind schedule, plans to get back on schedule is to order parts in the coming week
• Plans for coming week is order parts, and start to build the circuit on a breadboard,  using the circuit components, like resistore, provide by the design course

We spent this week finishing the Design Review Document, which took up most of our time. We are on schedule given the pivot we made. There are no major concerns present as of now.

1. Was mostly busy with the design document this week. Have slack comping up to work on the SCRUD. Should be on time as planned.

This week was spent working on creating voice samples for testing, finishing the voice detection algorithm and finishing the Design Review Document.

Instead of manually recording testing samples and converting it in audacity or some other software, I created a MATLAB script with autorecorder that records small 4-second (or however long I wanted) samples and saves it in MATLAB. This allowed me to both create samples easily and more conveniently, since I didn’t need external software and removed the cumbersome step of manually converting and importing samples to test. I was able to look at both the time and frequency domain representations and found that generally it was easier to analyze the energy in the time domain. This is because there were clear gaps between words which resulted in large changes in energy relative to time. In the frequency domain, rap vocals varied too much and didn’t show any significant interesting features to test on.

I also spent a lot of time finishing up the Design Review Document. In there is a much more detailed outline of how all the algorithms will work. Next week, I want to optimize the Spectral Energy Density I am performing on the vocals to get better accuracy. I will change it based on how testing goes. So far, I am relatively on track. I am a few days behind since I was behind last week, but that is due to the pivot our group performed. However, I still have slack time left and the project is well-within reach to finish on time.

Status Report

This week we further progressed on our initial minimum viable product. The project is overall still on track. We also began working on our design review presentation and report. So far no real hiccups have popped up and there are no real risks as of right now. Since we decided on a project late, we are looking to make sure we are not on a time crunch. As mentioned last week, we still have lots of slack built in to each team member’s schedule so we can help each other. So far, everything has been managed well as we head into the design review report.

Since our minimal viable product hinges upon the successful detection of a person’s rapping, I am working to make sure the voice tempo detection will work. I recorded samples of my own voice, and was able to clearly delineate start and stops between individual words. Even at faster tempos, the way human speech works means that there were clear stops between each word. Using spectral energy density, these gaps can be measured when the average energy of the sound input drops below a certain threshold. From initial testing, this threshold can be extremely low when the recording is clean, thus we can have a relatively high rate of detecting each word. Next week I plan on generating a lot of samples of different types of rapping, both slow and fast and from both my own voice as well as samples taken online, to test.

• Spent researching additional components for the pre-filtering circuit. Plan on using two 3.5mm jack breakouts to feed from microphone to circuit and out of circuit. And plan to use 3.5mm jack to usb converter to then feed the output into a laptop.
• Progress, maybe be a little behind schedule, I plan on purchasing parts in the coming week to try and keep on schedule
• For the coming week, I plan on purchasing materials and starting to actually put some components on a circuit board. However, the upcoming design review might make it hard to find time to work in the  lab

This week I was responsible for freezing the API so that we can build our respective parts without having to wait for the others. We did have a discussion which allowed us to think more about what each of us needs for Input and Output.

This is an artifact from our initial discussion