This week was primarily dedicated to our design review. As the presenter for our team, I spent a large chunk of my time rehearsing and refining our material before Wednesday’s public presentation. In the presentation, I covered the basic design for our system, testing plans, and our schedule for the rest of the semester. The slides for our presentation can be found in this post.
Aside from the design review, I have spent a couple hours working on the circuit simulator as well. I have still been having trouble getting an accurate simulation to work with nonlinear components, so quite a bit of my time has been spent researching the best ways to do this. In particular, I have been reading through the documentation and source code for SPICE (this website offers some nice guides) in order to see what I could emulate feasibly in my own simulator. I have also produced a small amount more code (on the basic-component-simulator) branch in my repository, which was shared in last week’s post. However, I still do not have a working demo to show involving nonlinear components, which I really was hoping to have by now.
I’m starting to worry that I may be falling a bit behind schedule, which is why I hope to dedicate ~20 hours to the circuit simulator this week. This, combined with the fact that there are no other major capstone deliverables this week, should hopefully enable me to finally break through this barrier. I think this would leave me in a comfortable place heading into spring break. This past week, I’ve had to deal with several midterm exams (both as a student and a TA), which have occupied 30+ hours of my time, between studying, writing questions, proctoring, and grading. I actually have no more exams to deal with until finals, so this should be another factor that enables me to get more done going forward. I also plan to stay in Pittsburgh for the majority of spring break, which should give me some extra time to get ahead.
By next week, I’m hoping to be able to test out basic filters and pedals. I don’t expect that they will be perfectly accurate, but I should at least be able to get a waveform in and see a waveform out on the other side. If I can’t get this delivered by next week despite good effort, I think it will be time to reconsider our approach to circuit simulation and perhaps consider some alternatives just in case things don’t work out as intended. For now I’m going to spend one more week focusing on getting things to work before jumping to any extremes.