Since the last status report, I have finalized the serial communication integration with Rahul. One issue that popped up when we were testing the integration was that the Arduino MKRZero we were using sometimes had difficulties connecting to the computer. We had to reset the board often and faced trouble with the bootloader. Thus we decided to switch to an Arduino Uno since it connected more reliably. Since the Uno only had one hardware Serial port, I had to look into a software serial library to do the same forwarding that we had on the MKRZero. This proved to be successful. The tradeoff here was that the Uno is slightly larger than the MKRZero, so we will need to design the casing around this constraint. However, we thought this was a necessary tradeoff since the user needs to be able to consistently connect to the hardware without having to touch the electronics in any way.
This week I have also hammered out additional features that enhance the user-friendliness and robustness of our product. Specifically, I added support for octave checking so that the scheduler takes into account not just the pitch of the note but also the octave it lands in. This makes the music more accurate to the original sheet music. Due to our one octave constraint, the accompanyBot must be placed over a fixed octave throughout the duration of a song. Thus during the scheduling algorithm, I added code to find the octave that is most frequently played. We return this octave number to the local application so that we can notify the user to move the accompanyBot over that specific octave. Then, during the piece, only notes falling in that range will be played. I also added code to dynamically calculate the max tempo of a song based on the song’s smallest note value, its time signature, and the physical limitation of our solenoids (which can only play four notes a second). If a user tries to update the tempo or upload a song that has a higher tempo than this maximum value, then the scheduler will cap the playing at this max tempo and also send the max tempo back to the application so that the user can be notified.
During the week, I also helped Aden with the 3D printing. I offered some suggestions for design changes after the initial prototype finished printing. Next week I will continue to help with the design and construction of the physical system.
Currently I am on schedule according to the Gantt chart. In the coming week, I will work on adding code that catches errors while the program is running, since we have discovered that connecting and disconnecting the serial communication results in certain bytes sent to the UART which are not able to be decoded properly and thus crash the scheduler program.