This week, we made it past the Design Review Presentation and have entered a major portion of the development stage this week. Our team’s GitHub has been set up, and initial contributions have been made with respect to the OMR parsing scripts and Raspberry Pi microcontroller scripts. Additionally, we discussed and moved forward with ordering the remaining 14 solenoids and 6 NMOS transistors to meet our hardware specifications.
Integration of the accompanyBot apparatus with the raspberry pi may have a hidden difficulty. Through Nora’s initial GPIO code, we were able to see that LEDs and smaller components respond more quickly compared to the bulkier inductance based solenoids. This may affect our ability to reach the requirement of 6 key presses per second. To mitigate the risk of not meeting this requirement, we may need to rescope the threshold metric so that the hardware is able to meet it. No further changes were made to our design and requirements.
Teaming
One strategy that we have employed for working together effectively is maintaining constant communication. Apart from our Slack channel, we have a group chat where we discuss issues and different ideas for our respective aspects of the projects. For example, this past week we made sure to get one another’s approval before ordering the remaining parts for our build. We also meet up at least once a week outside of class time to update each other on our individual progress, write our team reports together, and work on any deliverables that we aimed to complete that week. Furthermore, we have made the following adjustments to fill in gaps related to challenges that have come up:
- Rearrangement of scheduled tasks – Due to the introduction of music21 to aid in our scheduling process, we adjusted the work assignments so that more time could be allocated to familiarizing ourselves with the library. Additionally, Rahul joined Nora in setting up the notes scheduler algorithm.
- Waiting for parts to arrive – While the remaining solenoids and transistors are being shipped, Aden has been helping Nora with her microcontroller scheduling tasks. This was anticipated and accounted for before ordering parts.