Vivian’s Status Report for 4/2

This week was a pretty productive week. I worked with Angel to cut and drill holes in the pvc to mount all the buttons. We also came up with a plan to attach the buttons to the pvc: they fit pretty snugly now, so for testing we don’t need to attach them with anything but for our final product we’ll use a little bit of hot glue. A professor told us that we can dissolve that hot glue with alcohol later if we need to replace a button. I also soldered leads on all the buttons and wired them through the controller. Then I worked with Angel to send the button data to the RPi to play a note, and we were able to do some testing on the buttons/controller.

Currently, some of the buttons are a bit delayed/don’t work reliably. I think part of the issue was from soldering, some of the plastic that the leads are mounted to melted during the soldering process (without direct heat onto the plastic, just from the residual heat from the lead) and so now some of the buttons don’t work super well. I ordered some backup buttons to try and replace the ones that don’t work. We also noticed that some of the buttons are harder to press than others, so I’m hoping ordering new buttons will allow us to take the 9 that are most reliable and easiest to press, so the user doesn’t have to squeeze the flute super hard.

I’m basically back on track with my schedule. I wanted to make the final breath sensor this week but with a lot of carnival stuff coming up I wasn’t able to. I plan to do that tomorrow in techspark before prepping for our demo with the team, which should get me back on schedule.

Next week, I hope to attach the breath sensor and gyroscope (on the Arduino Nano) inside the physical controller. I also hope to work with Angel to send this data to the RPi. Finally, I want to test the physical controller to feel and accuracy so we have time to make any adjustments we need before the final demo.