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Team Status Report for 2/8

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?

The most significant risk we are currently faced with is making the wrong choices in our early design stages. To manage this risk, we have each spent the week researching the tradeoffs of the design choices we each need to make in our portions of the project. For the larger technical challenges of our project we plan to test our proposed solutions to them early in case they do not work out the way we expected. Our primary contingency plan consists of having planned out alternatives ahead of time in the case of a fall-through with our current design.

Were any changes made to the existing design of the system (requirements, block diagram, system spec, etc)? Why was this change necessary, what costs does the change incur, and how will these costs be mitigated going forward?

The main change made to our existing design was the connections between all of the components. Originally, we planned to have the microphone send motion and audio data to the computer while also sending the audio data straight to the speaker. We decided this would be an awkward wiring system for the user and instead opted to send everything through the computer, especially as our original design included some filtering of the microphone signal which we deemed unnecessary after research. We also previously planned on using a hardware filter to separate the vocal from the backing track in the speaker but decided this would be more achievable using software.

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Kiera’s Status Report for 2/8

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.

This week I researched the logistics surrounding the motion tracking portion of the project to prepare for our design presentation. The main questions I looked into answering were “What board would be best fit for connecting the accelerometer to?” and “How can we use the accelerometer data to detect change in direction?”. Considering our design goal of keeping the product lightweight and portable, and since we don’t require a large amount of processing power on the hardware end (a majority of our computation will occur in the software), I found that a microcontroller (likely an arduino) would be the best choice for our design. With this taken into consideration I searched for existing arduino projects that used an accelerometer in a way similar to how we intend to and found that the MPU6050 sensor is a good fit for our needs. The MPU6050 gives acceleration (x, y, z) and angular velocity data (x, y, z). Changes in sign of any of the components could be used to indicate a change of direction of the user but I plan to continue to look into other algorithms to give more accurate results.

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

My progress is on schedule, as I have done enough research to make the design choices in my portion of the project that are necessary for us to move forward. 

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

In the next week I hope to have developed a diagram of the motion-tracking/microphone system, including specific components, the connections between them, and the system’s connection to the computer. Additionally, I plan to do more research on algorithms that use both the acceleration and angular velocity metrics to detect change of direction, or potentially other indicators that the user is moving to a beat.