This week we met in pods with other teams to discuss potential ethical issues associated with our project while also providing feedback on our peers’ projects. Some points that were brought up in the discussion were considerations for possible areas that could go wrong and groups of people for whom our product is not designed for. In terms of problems that could arise, if the product fails during a performance, this could result in embarrassment for users. Additionally, if the timing is off then users will have difficulties when they go on to practice and play with other people. Finally, issues with the product could potentially break the piano if the force is too high or harm people’s hands if they stick their fingers under the solenoids. These considerations all pose risks to the success of the accompanyBot.
Since we are in the integration phase now, another big risk to the project is that we encounter roadblocks with joining the different subsystems. To address this risk, we are going to discuss clear requirements for the interfaces before implementing. We are also redistributing the attention of team members to focus on areas that are at risk.
There will have to be more changes to the design of the chassis since the dimensions of the solenoids did not match up with the dimensions of the piano keys. There is enough space on the black keys, but the white keys may prove to be difficult to build around. We will likely have to offset the solenoids inside the chassis so that they are not directly adjacent to one another allowing them to fit along the length of the octave. Hopefully it does not prove impossible to construct, but I believe it is still viable. There was a minor change to our system, specifically the image displaying done in the GUI application. This required the incorporation of poppler and pdf2image modules for python. The model of our system from the design report still functions the same however.
In terms of our schedule, some changes will be made. In particular, Rahul will be moving attention to getting the notes scheduling finalized. Aden is primarily taking up the building of the chassis, and will be working on this solo next week instead. Nora will be focusing on integrating with the computer with the help of Rahul in the coming week.
This is the change being made to the Gantt Chart tasks for week 8:
