Team Status Update for 10/11

Team Status Update for 10/11

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Tasks Accomplished

The team has finished up our trade studies and also compiled the BOM and sent it out for review. We hope to get our parts soon to start work on MVP building.

We have finished our system architecture, including block diagrams for both hardware and software aspects of our project. We will be working on our design document this week, as well as hopefully start receiving parts to begin our MVP work.

Potential Risks

  • Not receiving any parts in the next week
    • Design can continue in the CAD design and circuit schematic fronts. Research can also be done by perusing existing code.
  • Other classes eating into our time (midterm season)
    • Most work can be done in parallel so we will be able to work without meeting, possibly saving time

Our design has changed to not include an FPGA, and is now purely driven by an MCU. We have also discussed many ways to mount the microphone, results of some of our discussions are in the scanned sketch below:

Our schedule is still in place but we are a little bit behind, particularly on the circuit schematic as well as the parts ordering.

Will’s Status Update for 10/11

Will’s Status Update for 10/11

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  1. Performed current/power calculations for determining the battery
  2. Finalized BOM with team together
  3. Worked and codified design and slides with rest of team
  4. Investigated osxAcousticSL library interfaces
Ram’s Status Report for 10/11

Ram’s Status Report for 10/11

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  1. Did calculations to make sure that sampling frequency was sufficient, and that for reasonable distances the angular resolution will also be good
  2. Did order-of-magnitude calculations to check that our response time will be < 500 ms (can’t say with certainty yet, but seems to be in the ballpark, under 500 ms)
  3. Looked at possible time-domain implementations of gcc-phat
  4. Worked on design review points, and slides with the team
  5. Finalized our BOM with the team
Leon’s Status Update for 10/11

Leon’s Status Update for 10/11

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Tasks Accomplished

  • Completed BOM with team, delivered to instructors for review (will be included in the team update)
  • Hardware block diagrams for system architecture design. Describes the specific hardware we are targeting in our system, as well as the interfacing between the modular components

  • Completed a first pass CAD design (version 0001a). The design is not yet modularized (i.e. everything is in the same part instead of multiple parts in an assembly), and does not have space for the MCU yet. There are lots of rough edges, however, it is a great starting point for us to visualize our design and quantify some numbers.

Deliverables for upcoming week

We’re running a bit behind schedule, so I’ll be trying to catch us up. Primarily I will be looking to finish up our circuit design schematics, as well as iterate on the CAD design. The goal is to have the design in a modular form next week, even if the individual modules are still rough.

Team Status Update for 10/2

Team Status Update for 10/2

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The team has been and will continue working on conducting trade studies on important components in order to finalize our BOM by Tuesday. We will also begin creating design documents such as block diagrams and schematics this week.

Potential risks for our coming week are:

  • Not having a complete BOM by deliverable date
    • We have built in slack time and a 2 week lead time in our schedule to manage the potential for this risk

No changes to our design have occurred yet (since it’s actively under design and thus nothing is set in stone). Our schedule is still in place and we’re still on track with the schedule.

Ram’s Status Update for 10/2

Ram’s Status Update for 10/2

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I worked on the following aspects of the project

1.

Understanding how the overall TDOA algorithm works and when it works well: I looked through some papers that used TDOA for sound source localization to figure out how they did it. Given the time differences, the TDOA algorithm itself is just a simple least-square fit using matrix manipulations (though some papers use more fancy methods like RANSAC depending on their use case and the type of noise they encounter). The key though is how the time differences themselves are calculated – this is usually done using cross-correlation between the different microphone signals but regular cross-correlation is very susceptible to noise, so there are some “generalized cross-correlation” methods that most implementations use (one popular one is called gcc-phat) – I’m not yet 100% sure exactly how it works, but the general idea seems to be that it essentially weights the frequencies in the signal differently to try to focus more on peaks corresponding to the signal, rather than surrounding noise.

One fortunate thing we realized recently is that we might not actually have to go through the pain of implementing all of this because there are some DSP libraries on the boards we are considering that already do a good chunk of this TDOA stuff – but this is still good to know in case we want to tweak the method or if our use case requires something different from what the library has to offer.

2.

The other thing I worked on, along with my team-mates, was the Bill of Materials. I looked through possible microphones that we could use – in particular, we were considering the advantages and disadvantages of PDM microphones vs analog microphones and discussing how to interface the microphones with a board (using an SAI interface for PDM microphones vs an I2S interface, or whether to use analog microphones and the board’s ADC).

 

So far I am on schedule, and next week we will all continue working on the bill of materials.

Will’s Status Update for 10/2

Will’s Status Update for 10/2

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For this week, I principally spent time looking into the particular MCUs along with some reference packages provided by ST (i.e STM32Cube). The packages contain useful analog and digital MEMS microphones acquisition software that we are evaluating for use along with compatible boards and requirements (i.e STM32F4 and STM32L4).

Leon’s Status Update for 10/2

Leon’s Status Update for 10/2

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This week I was working on doing research on speech separation hardware requirements, which connected with the BOM selection work our whole team was working on. I specifically did research into the requirements on the MCU front, and as a result of this research have decided on some of the hardware specifications for our board. I also worked with Will and Ram to determine the specifications needed for microphones in order to interface with our target board.

In terms of schedule, I’m mostly on schedule with our initial planned schedule. The rate of progress on my part with the BOM work seems to be slow though, and although I anticipate being able to finish by our preset deadline, it would be close to the deliverable date.

This next week, my deliverables include a completed BOM (preferably by Tuesday), as well as some block diagrams for our system architecture design.

 

Sound2Sight: Project Summary

Sound2Sight: Project Summary

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Sound2Sight is a device for assisting hard-of-hearing people in their everyday lives, by visually alerting them about the direction of important sources of sound. Specifically, we will focus on alerting them to human conversation or voices around them.

The device is a wearable pair of glasses, equipped with an array of microphones and simple augmented reality in the form of a small heads up display. This microphone array will identify human speech, and determine the direction of the sound relative to the individual. This information will then be displayed as a visual cue in the form of an arrow on the heads up display, pointing towards the direction of the source of sound, This will greatly increase the individual’s peripheral awareness, allowing them to identify and turn towards people talking to them.