This week, we spent some of our time together working out the final details of our design ahead of the design document that was due on Monday. One of the big things this involved was hashing out our test procedure in greater detail than we had ever done before. Ultimately, we decided on a protocol (which we discussed in lab this week) that involved using an audio splitter to derive our reference and test signal from the same source at the same time. We could then feed one of these signals through a real guitar pedal, and another through our simulated version, before using normalized cross correlation as a metric to measure the similarity between the two.
We also placed an order for parts just before break. Professor Sullivan is kindly allowing us to use his audio lab, which eliminates the need for many of the components we had planned to order. However, we did request a few parts such as a reference guitar pedal, and the splitter cable we need. We chose a DIY pedal that had simple circuitry on the inside, and we carefully chose one that consisted entirely of components we plan to support in our own simulator.
Much of the other work we have been doing lately has been on our own individual parts. Matt has been working on the circuit simulator, Stephen on the UI, and Joseph on the audio processing. We ultimately hope to spend about another week or two on development and unit testing before we begin integration. Some parts of the project have made good strides this week, but there’s still a lot left to do, which is why we all intend to dedicate some time over spring break to getting our components up and running.