Team Status Report for 02/07

The team worked together this week discussing project requirements and whether some goals (drum playback) were too ambitious for the project. Overall, we determined that we’d keep the goals as is, since initial research from everyone revealed that some goals (like MIDI keyboard input) could possibly be completed earlier, allowing for some more leeway in the case that things go wrong. While we have been discussing initial system drafts, our plan is to work on block diagrams next week for our high level vision of the design. This aligns with our schedule outlined in the gantt chart, such that no changes are envisioned. Our general proposal and set of features stays the same, and we’ve begun gathering the materials for the project (DE10 Standard FPGA and MIDI Keyboard) in order for us to kickstart both the design process and initial implementation steps next week. The biggest risk for blocking progress as of now seems to be our team’s lack of DSP experience. Learning some of the techniques and algorithms for filtering, then, could potentially cause us to spend more time on planning/designing some sections of the project. In the case that this happens, our plan would be to dedicate extra time (~3 hours a week) into reviewing content from 18-290 more in depth and implementing algorithms in simulators like Matlab in the case of confusion.