Anita’s Status Report for 2/18

What did you personally accomplish this week on the project? Give files or photos that demonstrate your progress. Prove to the reader that you put sufficient effort into the project over the course of the week (12+ hours).  

Next week’s design review presentation took a lot more time than we were expecting, and it slowed down making concrete progress on our project.

We spent the majority of this week’s work time on our project presentation– as previously stated, it took a lot more time than we were expecting to completely flesh out the implementation details, features, and interdependencies. While there isn’t an explicit impact on the project through these discussions, it is an investment to plan ahead on this large project that will pay off later, when we don’t need to re-pivot the design of our solution.

Fleshing out the details required constant weighing of pros and cons with every design decision. While it was admittedly rather meticulous and nitpicky at times, I think it made our project goal more concrete and approachable. It broke down this 14-week large project into smaller, more digestible steps. There are still some components that we will have to have discussions about, but enough has been discussed such that we have a clear path forward.

Speaking of digestible steps, we also modified our Gantt chart. The changes that impacted me: we also had to pivot our project to use the audio modules, so I also spent the week reading documentation about aubio and pyaudio, and ramping up on these unfamiliar modules. I have reached a place where I have implemented preliminary semi-RT vocal to frequency conversions, though the confidence behind those conversions is abysmal. I will work on that in the following weeks.

Is your progress on schedule or behind? If you are behind, what actions will be taken to catch up to the project schedule? 

A lot of stress has been relieved now that I will not be using a homegrown algorithm. As of right now, I am on pace, and will be working with Kelly to maintain this pace.

Please list the particular ECE courses (if any) that covered the engineering science and mathematics principles your team used to develop your design? If there are no courses please tells us how you learned those principles over the last week ?

A lot of this week was large-project design and ramping up with new libraries. A lot of these skills were implicitly learned from taking classes that required such skills. Examples of some of these classes include:

• 15-112: End of semester 4-week long term project
• 18-240: lab4– required breaking down a large problem into submodules
• 05-438: Semester long educational app design proposal
• 15-445: Four projects that integrated into a database manager
• 15-440: labs that required design decisions and weighing tradeoffs

While large project design was never something explicitly taught, I have picked up and developed this skill implicitly over the years.

What deliverables do you hope to complete in the next week? 

I hope to work on the RT-feedback to increase the confidence rating, as well as come up with a preliminary scoring system.