Author: mpparalk

These last two weeks have been pretty wild. As I stated as the goal of my last post, I wanted to finish up the design report on Monday as my goal for the week. This ended up taking both of Monday and Tuesday, as we had a sick member of our team. We got a PDF for feedback, with a couple points highlighted. I think it will be beneficial to discuss it with our mentor and TA(s), since the scan did not turn out that well. One thing I noted was that we increased the 60 seconds for music changing to 90 seconds, as we believe that long-distance runners will prefer less warping. Furthermore, from testing, we are aware that a minimum of 60 seconds is needed for accurate pace measurements, with more time preferred.

Our group is currently in discussion on how to proceed with our project in light of COVID-19. Our group members will no longer be on campus, so we will need to be more careful with how we coordinate pieces of the project. The virus has introduced a couple dangers to our project. For one, we will need to reevaluate our team member responsibilities. The previous division of tasks assumed that we could have face-to-face meetings, but now that is not possible. Another pain point will be the integration phase, as we cannot physically meet. Finally, testing will have to be reevaluated, since each member will need individual testing equipment and a complete repository of the project.

This week, we will be hashing out all of these ideas. Individually, I plan on creating the new UI for the main page of the app.

I spent most of my time for capstone this week working on the design presentation (finishing touches) and the design proposal. Our team wanted to ensure that we incorporated the feedback from the proposal that we received from both the mentors and our peers. We discuss this more in depth within our team status report. For the design proposal, we split up the paper into portions to work on individually. I am tasked with completing a piece of the system decision, part of the design specification, and part of the tradeoffs section.

In terms of deliverables, my top goal is to finish the design with the team. Finalizing each portion of the project is important so that we can begin the actual creation.

This week, I finished my exploration into using Python with Android Studio. I discovered several different methods. Each came with a host of problems that made them illogical to use.  Most of their problems were either that they didn’t have a way to access the Android Step Detector and Step Counter sensors, or that they didn’t provide ways to make callable functions in Python to interface with the app built in Java. We will be including a section in the design presentation and report with more details.

There was no specific reason we wanted to use Python other than for its familiarity, so we have decided to write the discrete wavelet transform with C/C++, which is natively supported by Android Studio. We also had the option of using Java, but feel that its efficiency for audio processing will not be as strong as C’s. I did a bit of searching for libraries that already implement the wavelet transform, and found a couple.

Finally, I worked on the design presentation slides to update them for our presentation next week. Specifically, the team discussed the data we had gathered to make conclusions on how we wanted to adjust our design goals and platform specifications.

I would say that the project is currently on track. We have taken the feedback from the proposal and used it to refine our project appropriately. Next week, the deliverables I want are the design doc (obviously) and having an app that uses a little C code as a proof-of-concept.

My contributions this week can be summarized into two major sections.

1. 1. Our whole group decided to gather data in order to determine the viability of using the phone and smartwatch built-in step counter functions. The three of us met up at the Tepper gym and measured the accuracy of two different Android phones and an Android watch. See the team update for more information. In this part, my contribution was in running on the treadmill as a second person so that we could have a second set of data. Based on the information we gathered, we have started to debate the necessity of pushing our application onto the watch. Its accuracy is lower than that of current design requirements,  so our only options are to acknowledge that we will not be hitting our requirements, or forcing a person to carry a phone with them. However, if we pick the latter option, then the watch is literally pointless.
   2.  As we outlined in our Proposal Presentation, I will be in charge of creating the UI and functionality of our smartphone application. For this week and up until Tuesday night, I am aiming to have created a very basic application that can run some python code. We need this written for two reasons. The first is to verify that our code base can be written in Python. Python has rich libraries for Audio and Signal processing, which we would like to utilize. However, as far as we are aware, most code-bases are built using only a single language. The second is that having a basic app will give us the chance to explore additional parts of our project in the next week, such as the most logical way to built out the UI, how music is imported, gather information on how long it takes to process music on the phone, and how to get step detector information from the Android API. So far, I have been looking over coding examples and following a basic tutorial to build my first app. Familiarizing myself with the host of different files and Android jargon has been the most challenging part of the week. The most exciting has been the fact that I figured out how to test the app directly on my phone. I would say that I am mostly on track to write the app by the end of next week. Aside from the app, I’m also hoping to begin work on the design presentation slides & writeup during next week.