Our week began with a scramble to complete our design review — we worked on finishing up the parts we had assigned to each other to write, creating diagrams, and formatting/revising the document as a whole. Altogether, we feel confident in the content we produced and hope that this will entail a much less arduous process of writing the final report.

After finishing the design review, we met up to discuss how all of our components would be integrated and communicate with each other via the interface that Edward has been constructing this week. We have a good general understanding of the structure and protocols, but, of course, we still need to agree on the details of what exactly our components will be sending to each other. Now that we’re halfway through the semester, we’re gearing towards integration and are trying to build a solid foundation to reduce future risks for when we actually bring everything together. With this in mind we also decided to make some updates in our gannt charts. We realized some of the components that needs to be programmed aren’t necessary for a base project so we are swapping the other of tasks to begin integration and to complete the other features after we have a base version implemented

We realized that, in our very basic prototype (not really a prototype since it doesn’t work… just a general assembly of components to see how the final product will approximately turn out) as seen in our design review, we had the microphones on the side of the base, which would only unidirectionally capture sound; we want omnidirectional sound so we can locate speakers all around the room. We could put the microphones on the top of the base, but then they’d be directly adjacent to the motors, which produce a decent amount of noise. Anna is going to look into different arrangements that would evade the motor nose and still manage to omnidirectionally capture sound.

Heather also spent this week working on the physical prototype. The elevator is working and pretty cool. It’s still a little jittery, and Heather needs to calculate exact angles for top and bottom to stop the elevator. She’s still figuring out how to properly structure the base. See her status update for a video!