This week was our proposal presentation where we received feedback from colleagues and professors about our project. Our feedback suggests that if we want to market our project to beginners, breath control has to be a more significant aspect. This is because learning breath control is one of the main challenges beginners face when starting to learn the flute. Our options are to either make the breath control feedback more accurate or pivot our use case in some other way (either by changing the woodwind instrument to one that has less of an emphasis on breath control or marketing the project towards intermediate players who need less work on breath control). While the first option fits more into our use case, we face the challenge of having to do a lot of signal processing, which we don’t have a lot of background in. We’re considering changing our design plan from using a microphone to sense breath control to something more mechanical like a small fan or pinwheel the user blows on, combined with an IR sensor to determine speed.

Due to these design changes, we have yet to order all our equipment and sensors. Therefore, we face the risk of delays in receiving the equipment and slowing our project progress. We hope to mitigate this by spending most of our time next week doing research for the changes in our design and working on the parts of the project that require equipment we already have: writing test code for Arduinos/RPis, beginning web app development, and creating our design presentation.