Currently, the project is in decent shape. No significant risks are jeopardizing the project. The main tasks left are displaying the statistics and making the system slightly more user-friendly and less buggy
No changes have been made to the overall system block diagram and the main progress this week has been finalizing some integration and adding minor features. Owen chose to rephrase the strum rate requirement to be “200 strums / minute” instead of “100BPM 1/8th notes” for clarity, but the required value did not change. We also slightly changed the LED current requirement from being at 1/2 brightness white to 1/2 brightness for the standard color on each string. We color-code the strings rather than setting them to white, so this is a more meaningful requirement
The main team progress this week was working on the communication between the Teensy and the Pi. Pi to Teensy communication has been in place for a while, but the communication from the Teensy to the Pi, and then to the web app, proved to be more complex. Tushaar implemented the UART communication on the Teensy side, and Ashwin implemented the communication from the Pi to the webapp. Owen and Ashwin worked together to read in the UART data on the Pi. This took quite a while to make work consistently, but the communication is now reliable and quite rapid.
The data sent back consists of a single integer, which contains whether the user played the note correctly or not and how incorrect their timing was. This information can be used to update the webapp graphic and will eventually be used to provide statistics as well.
A video of the communication to the webapp in action can be seen here: https://youtu.be/G2P06dhhFrA
We also finally implemented the communication of the system state from the Pi to the Teensy. Previously, the system had to be switched between “performance” and “training” mode by modifying the firmware on the Teensy. We have now implemented a selection on the webapp for the mode. This data is included in the UART communication to the Teensy. The Teensy then uses this information to set the mode.
Finally, we worked on implementing the buzzer/metronome, which was the final major system requirement that we had not started on at all. This turned out to be relatively quick on the firmware end and was not too difficult to implement on the Pi. The Pi uses the MIDI file to find the song tempo and sends this info to the Teensy, which then sets the buzzer to this tempo.
No changes in the schedule have been made. As indicated on our schedule, we are mainly working on integration and the final project documents. We have also been maintaining a list of bugs/to-dos in addition to the Gantt chart that helps us quickly sort in-progress tasks and take care of them
Currently the main tasks remaining are fixing minor bugs and working on the final presentation, video, and report, as well as prepping for the demo