This week I got (1) the BOM finalized and ordered the items for the very first prototype of both the pad and central hub system, (2) found online free drum sample libraries to load onto the central hub microcontroller for real time convolution to mimic real drum audio, and (3) developed the specific circuitry and connectivity of all hardware systems.
I don’t really think that the central hub will have too much variation in architecture so I feel confident that we don’t have to change the architecture/design. However, for the pads I ordered the very preliminary design which uses a rubber head and piezos to detect impact. This might not give the sensitivity we require to pinpoint location and impact characteristics so we might have to look for a different configuration but this requires the prototype to be tested using FSR, PVDF, and mesh head.
I started developing the base bootloader code for the Arduino Pro Mini & Daisy Seed that we will be using for data packaging and central hub logic respectively. The Arduino Pro Mini can be flashed using an Arduino Uno so that should be fine but in the Daisy Seed I need to flash both the RAM with the audio samples on boot as well as the code I want to flash it with. So I am reading the datasheets currently to figure out the setup code for each of these.
I feel as though my process is only a couple days behind because we cannot start developing or testing the code until we have the hardware components and that is our biggest bottleneck in this project. However, the software side seems to be making some progress in their translation.
By next week we hopefully receive the materials we ordered so that we can develop a working prototype of our central hub ecosystem with the hardware and basic unit testing code for the audio output and the SPI interconnect with the receiver hub.