Final Presentation

Description

Presentations of the projects are given a few days after the Final Demo to an audience of fellow student reviewers, the lab instructors, and occasionally faculty or even students from outside the class who are following up a project of personal interest to them. The style is formal and professional, and students should dress accordingly (Generally business professional, or what you would wear to a career fair).

Requirements and Grading

Each project team has 25 minutes for a Powerpoint presentation and questions. Every group member must present their own work contributing to the project and be ready to answer questions. Presentations are judged on the basis of presentation technique and of technical organization and content.

Presentation technique includes dress, use of display materials (slides), clarity of speech, absence of filler words/fidgeting, proper eye contact with audience and smooth transitions between speakers. Content is judged on use of a proper introduction, orderly and connected development of ideas, absence of unnecessary details, proper pacing to stay within the allotted time, and an adequate summary at the close of the talk. Quantitative results are expected whenever applicable. Here is a general outline to follow:

  1. Introduction to your team and your project.
  2. Objective. What problem are you solving?
  3. Brief review of original design, statement on areas of design that changed, and overview of each functional block's requirements.
  4. Description of project build and functional test results. You can choose to include a short (30s) video of your project here.
  5. Discussion of successes and challenges, as well as explanations of any failed verifications demonstrating and understanding of the engineering reason behind the failure
  6. Conclusions from the project: what did you learn, what would you do differently if you redesigned your project, etc.
  7. Recommendations for further work.

Any significant, relevant ethical issues should be briefly addressed, preferably in a single slide.

Presentations will be graded using the presentation grading rubric. Your slides should follow ECE or College of Engineering presentation theming.

Submission and Deadlines

Slides for your final presentation must be uploaded to your project page on PACE prior to your presentation time. Deadlines for signing up may be found on the Calendar. Sign-up for the final presentation is done through PACE. Remember to sign up for a peer review of another group.

Automatic Piano Tuner

Joseph Babbo, Colin Wallace, Riley Woodson

Automatic Piano Tuner

Featured Project

# Automatic Piano Tuner

Team Members:

- Colin Wallace (colinpw2)

- Riley Woodson (rileycw2)

- Joseph Babbo (jbabbo2)

# Problem

Piano tuning is a time-consuming and expensive process. An average piano tuning will cost in the $100 - $200 range and a piano will have to be retuned multiple times to maintain the correct pitch. Due to the strength required to alter the piano pegs it is also something that is difficult for the less physically able to accomplish.

# Solution

We hope to bring piano tuning to the masses by creating an easy to use product which will be able to automatically tune a piano by giving the key as input alongside playing the key to get the pitch differential and automatically turning the piano pegs until they reach the correct note.

# Solution Components

## Subsystem 1 - Motor Assembly

A standard tuning pin requires 8-14 nm of torque to successfully tune. We will thus need to create a motor assembly that is able to produce enough torque to rotate standard tuning pins.

## Subsystem 2 - Frequency Detector/Tuner

The device will use a microphone to gather audio measurements. Then a microprocessor processes the audio data to detect the pitch and determine the difference from the desired frequency. This can then generate instructions for the motor; direction to turn pegs and amount to turn it by.

## Subsystem 3 - User Interface/Display Panel

A small but intuitive display and button configuration can be used for this device. It will be required for the user to set the key being played using buttons on the device and reading the output of the display. As the device will tune by itself after hearing the tone, all that is required to display is the current key and octave. A couple of buttons will suffice to be able to cycle up and down keys and octaves.

## Subsystem 4 - Replaceable Battery/Power Supply

Every commercial product should use standard replaceable batteries, or provide a way for easy charging. As we want to develop a handheld device, so that the device doesn’t have to drag power wires into the piano, we will need a rechargeable battery pack.

# Criterion For Success

The aim of the Automatic Piano Tuner is to allow the user to automatically tune piano strings based on a key input alongside playing a note. We have several goals to help us meet this aim:

- Measure pitch accurately, test against known good pitches

- Motor generates enough torque to turn the pegs on a piano

- Tuner turns correctly depending on pitch

- Easy tuning of a piano by a single untrained person

Project Videos