Gauri’s Status Report for 03/21

This was our first Zoom quarantine week!  I think we managed quite well taking everything into account.  This week was mostly us rehashing our project plan.  We spent 10:30-12:30 on Monday and Wednesday during what would be our normal class time discussing what changes we need to make and contingency plans in case our Plan Bs don’t work out.  We decided a few key things – not to build a physical platform or use the motors (TechSpark closed yesterday so this was a good decision), to use SolidWorks (and some other software potentially) to model and animate the physical platform, continue using our RPis, cameras and mics to get audio and visual signal input and process them.  We spent quite a while on Friday researching and looking for cardioid unidirectional mics and unfortunately could not find any that fit our size and cost requirements.  Instead we decided to build baffles for the omni-directional Adafruit mics to contain the range of sound (also consulted on this with Professor Sullivan).  We also spent time writing our SOW.

We are definitely behind schedule and lost a week because of corona but will get our parts next Thursday and until then work on the software parts of our project (classifiers and SolidWorks animation specifically).  Since the course requirements have significantly changed this loss of time has been taken into account in our new project goals and while we know we won’t be able to build our original project, we are hoping to come close!  🙂