We spent a lot of time together on Zoom this past week for integration and while Heather assembled the physical device. First and foremost, I worked with Edward to edit my audio detection code to be able to communicate with main. Before Heather added in the audio portion of the device, I wanted to make some optimizations. The acoustic location was updating the direction of the speaker far too often — all the readings would be around the same value…
I spent this past week learning about SPI works on the Jetson, configuring the new MCP3008 ADC and the analog mics, and testing the setup. Unfortunately, even after all the research that had gone into choosing the MCP3008 and learning about SPI communication, I found that the MCP3008’s 190kHz sampling rate drops to about 600Hz (so 200SPS per microphone…) in reality. I did my best to maximize the sampling rate, knowing that the primary culprits for the immense slowdown were…
The beginning of this week was a bit of a grind to prepare for the demo. I mostly had my microphones working but found that the microphone delay was a bit finicky. I’ve known that the microphones each have a different amount of delay, and I spent a good amount of time last week figuring out the approximate delay of two of the mics relative to one, then hardcoded this into my acoustic location program. However, when I demoed for…
The plan laid out last week about using multiple I2C mics and a much simpler acoustic location algorithm was scrapped. I actually decided to abandon I2C mics altogether, since the sampling rate was simply too garbage. Instead, I resolved to find other higher-sampling mics and spent the first couple days of the week researching. I found some mini USB mics on Amazon that could sample at 44100 Hz — which is significantly better than the previous I2C mics, by two…
This past week, I played around with different arrangements and orientations of the microphones. I first tried a very simple linear arrangement with the three microphones, expecting the microphone nearest to me (the acoustic source) to reflect that it had picked up the sound first, but for some reason, it appeared that they were detecting my voice out of order. I’m still not quite sure why this is happening, but it would obviously throw a wrench into my acoustic location…
This past week, we worked hard on writing the remaining pieces of the design report, revising, and adding in figures. I spent a lot of time figuring out how to access the I2C ports on the Jetson. Unlike Adafruit, NVIDIA doesn’t provide a friendly little tutorial to hold your hand through the process 🙁 but I figured out what packages to install and what modules to import, so now I can get I2C input from the mics. My analog microphones…
This week began with finishing up and practicing the design review presentation, which I gave during Wednesday’s class. It went well, but Vyas did point out something that we haven’t given much thought yet, which is how we plan to implement communication between the Jetson and the user’s computer. This falls under Heather’s domain, and she was quick to jump on the research for it. In addition, last week, I mentioned that we could no longer use the four-microphone I2S…
I started off this week with a rather concerning realization, which is that our original plan to use four microphones was flawed. We intended to connect two microphones to each of the Jetson Nano’s two I2S ports, but this would not allow for us to distinguish the microphones’ signals from each other and analyze them individually, which we need to do in order to determine the direction of the source. I talked about it with the team, and we have…
This past week, my main goal was to verify a stable multi-mic connection among the Adafruit I2S microphones. In order to test this without a Jetson Nano (since we were not sure when placing our first batch of orders whether we could afford getting every single team member a Nano), I did some research to find that the mics would work with an Arduino Zero, a smaller and significantly cheaper chip with which I could test them. I then wired…