Week of Feb. 17
Today we created our block diagram and placed a parts order for ultrasonic sensors. We got one ultrasonic sensor that was leftover in the lab supplies so next week we will start to work with that.
Week of Feb. 24
Today we successfully characterized one note for our keyboard using an ultrasonic sensor through an arduino. Next week we plan to add more notes and possibly experiment with other types of sensors, such as infrared or proximity.
Week of Mar. 3
Today our batch of Sparkfun Ultrasonic Sensors came in. We were dismayed to discover that the sensors do not work very well and we are thinking of changing what kind of sensors we will use. The first ultrasonic sensor we got was just a spare in the lab and it worked very well. These new sensors being unreliable is a bit of a setback in our project.
Week of Mar. 31
This week the focus was coding. We are attempting to interface multiple ultrasonic sensors with the arduino. So far it is not going so well. We will need to look further into this problem.
Week of Apr. 7
Our biggest obstacle right now is figuring out how to interface multiple ultrasonic sensors with the arduino. It seems like there are issues with interrupts or timing somehow. The arduino.cc has a library called "NewPing" that is designed for interfacing ultrasonic sensors to arduino. According to one of the example sketches, the biggest problems seem to arise with the timing of multiple sensors. We will experiment with using this new library.