Grading Scheme :: ECE 445 - Senior Design Laboratory

Grading Scheme

 

The grading scheme for the course, as well as links to specific requirements for each assignment/deliverable and evaluation sheets, are given in the table below. Due dates for each assignment/deliverable can be found on the course Calendar. Please note:

Below is the points breakdown for all assignments/deliverables for the course, sorted chronologically:

Item Team / Individual Score Points Evaluation Sheet**
Project Selection Form Individual 5 None
Lab Notebook Individual 50 PDF
Weekly TA Meetings Team N/A None
Weekly Team Update Meeting Team 3/session None
Team Contract Team 5  
Project Proposal Team 25 PDF
PCB Design Exercise Individual 10 PDF
Soldering Exercise Individual 10 PDF
Design Document
Requirements and Verification
Team 40 PDF
Individual Progress Report Individual 25 PDF
Mock Demo Individual 5 None
Final Demo * Team 150 PDF
Final Presentation * Individual 50 PDF
Final Report: Technical Team 30 PDF
Final Report: English/Format Team 20 PDF
Peer Reviews (2 total) Individual 40 (total) None
Teamwork & Participation Individual 20 None

* Grades for these will be the average of the TA and Instructor grades; peer review grades will be used to provide feedback.
** Evaluation Sheets are subject to minor changes.

VoxBox Robo-Drummer

Featured Project

Our group proposes to create robot drummer which would respond to human voice "beatboxing" input, via conventional dynamic microphone, and translate the input into the corresponding drum hit performance. For example, if the human user issues a bass-kick voice sound, the robot will recognize it and strike the bass drum; and likewise for the hi-hat/snare and clap. Our design will minimally cover 3 different drum hit types (bass hit, snare hit, clap hit), and respond with minimal latency.

This would involve amplifying the analog signal (as dynamic mics drive fairly low gain signals), which would be sampled by a dsPIC33F DSP/MCU (or comparable chipset), and processed for trigger event recognition. This entails applying Short-Time Fourier Transform analysis to provide spectral content data to our event detection algorithm (i.e. recognizing the "control" signal from the human user). The MCU functionality of the dsPIC33F would be used for relaying the trigger commands to the actuator circuits controlling the robot.

The robot in question would be small; about the size of ventriloquist dummy. The "drum set" would be scaled accordingly (think pots and pans, like a child would play with). Actuators would likely be based on solenoids, as opposed to motors.

Beyond these minimal capabilities, we would add analog prefiltering of the input audio signal, and amplification of the drum hits, as bonus features if the development and implementation process goes better than expected.