One of our main concerns going into this next week is that a majority of our group is busy in the second half of the week, so we are front loading our work on the design report to be almost completely done by Monday. This will give us time to clean it up before the due date on Friday, without having to stress over the timeline as people in our group get ready for fall break. We are also trying to solidify the schedule for each person’s design responsibilities and make sure they align such that we are able to integrate our parts together, leaving time for integration hiccups. As a result, we are individually preparing timelines for our sections to be integrated on Monday during class time.
In terms of design concerns, we are worried that C++ might not be the best platform for signal processing, and are looking into other options, namely Python and Matlab. Both of these have more support for signal processing that C does, and should only be marginally slower than C since many of the signal processing tools in Python and Matlab are wrappers of functions in C. This change, while still being explored, would not have an impact on project cost.
Our schedule is being updated due to the introduction of a new team member. This will be finalized when we next meet in person on Monday, 10/9/23.
Weekly Status Report Question (Team): ABET #1 says … An ability to identify, formulate, and solve complex engineering problems by applying principles of engineering, science, and mathematics
In our design solution for our project, one main part of our signal processing involves analyzing the harmonic spectrum of the audio input. After performing a Fourier transform (FT) on a recording of a single musical note, multiple spikes at different frequencies will appear. These different spikes represent the harmonic frequencies that make up the inputted note (or notes). This harmonic breakdown can vary between different instruments, with different instruments producing different harmonic signatures for the same fundamental frequency, or lowest present frequency, which represents the note being played. However, since the harmonics of the fundamental frequency are all positive integer multiples of the fundamental, if we multiply the original signal by its corresponding harmonics, and take the highest peak present after, we will be presented with the fundamental frequency we are looking for. This method, Harmonic Product Spectrum (HPS), shown below is extremely common in pitch detection.
