Weekly Progress
I didn’t get a lot of time to work on the actual meat of the project this week, since a lot of the time I had was focused on the design review presentation as well as on the design review paper. The design review presentation went very well, and I am happy with the feedback we got. Through the course of preparing the presentation and the paper, I have fleshed out the designs of the effects modules and have developed block diagrams for the effects modules, as well as working with the other group members to develop the flow of the whole effects pipeline. Thus while the actual implementation did not make much progress this week, I hope the time spent designing the effects modules will prove to save time in the implementation and debugging stages later on.
This week I also got to spend a little bit of time messing with the MIDI keyboard I received last week, and it turns out that it should work well with the project. I found a MIDI cable that has a detachable head and exposes the wires, which will help a lot when wiring together the support circuitry. Unfortunately, I am currently missing a part that I would need to create the complete circuitry, and I am waiting on the rest of the analog parts list to be fully fleshed out in order to save money on shipping ($10 shipping on a $0.80 part?). However, if the parts list needs more time, I will just place the order early this week anyways and just eat the shipping cost into the budget, as we don’t have a lot of parts we need to buy, so we should have plenty of budget to spare. In other news, I also recently purchased a nice synthesizer for fun, and for the project, we can use it as a comparison for testing purposes. Hopefully, we can get our hands on some other commercial synths in the coming weeks so we have more to test against.
Goals for Next Week
Due to us not really anticipating the amount of work that needed to go into the design review, and it not being properly allocated in the schedule, I am probably a little behind in my implementation goals for the effects modules. However, due to our built-in slack, I will be able to pick up the pace of development of the effects modules. I would like to get at least bare-bones versions of the effects modules finished by this week and begin developing a testing framework for the effects pipeline.
