Mock Demo

Description

The mock demo is an informal but mandatory event held with your TA during your weekly meeting time. At this point, all sub-systems of your project should have been constructed, but perhaps not yet fully integrated and tested. These sub-systems correspond to the blocks originally outlined in the Project Proposal and improved upon in your Design Review.

Requirements and Grading

If you are present, you will earn full points for the mock demo. Thus, no score is directly attached to your progress by this point, but adequate progress is critical if the project is to be completed on time.

Submission and Deadlines

Nothing needs to be submitted on the course website. You should bring hardware to your weekly TA meeting, during which the mock demo will take place.

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.