- What are the most significant risks that could jeopardize the success of the project? How are these risks being managed? What contingency plans are ready?
After resolving the risks with our software last week, we believe that our most significant risks lie within our hardware. Because the quality of ICs (especially the tilt sensor and the radio chip) is not guaranteed, we will start component testing immediately after our chips arrive. If there is a defect, we will order another one (maybe from another seller) within one day.
- Were any changes made to the existing design of the system? Why was this change necessary, what costs does the change incur, and how will these costs be mitigated going forward?
We did change the battery for our gloves from alkaline batteries to rechargeable lipo batteries. Lipo batteries are lighter and have a power density, which will in return make our system lighter and last longer. It will also cut down our development costs as we don’t have to purchase batteries all the time. To address the possible (although unlikely) overheating of the battery, we will monitor the power consumption and temperature of the lipo batteries as we develop the system. We will also add an insulator layer to our glove if necessary.
- Provide an updated schedule if changes have occurred.
There was no change to our schedule.
- Component that we got to work.
Oscar continued working on the synthesizer and now it supports real time pitch and volume control and timbre selection. Here is a short demo video.
- Adjustment to team work to fill in gaps related to new design challenge
Although Oscar was in charge of developing the synthesizer, he encountered a major sound card issue that couldn’t be resolved when developing on Ubuntu. He then switched to Windows and wrote everything from scratch using new libraries. In order to make sure the resulting product is still macOS compatible, Karen and Yuqi (both owning a MacBook) both jumped in and conducted a preliminary setup experiment. After changing the code a bit and installing the correct version of libraries, our synthesizer is now both Windows and macOS compatible.