Mock Presentation

Description

Like the mock design review and the mock demo, the mock presentation is an informal, mandatory event designed to better prepare you for your Final Presentation. These sessions are run by staff and students from the Department of Communication, who are experts in teaching professional communication skills. In this session, you are only given five minutes to present a few slides on one major component of your project. Your presentation should include at least one block diagram, one graph/plot, and some math. You will also have the opportunity to see several other mock presentations. You will be given feedback based on the organization of the presentation, delivery and your ability to present as a team (so all members must speak).

Requirements and Grading

The mock presentation is meant to be a small subset of your final presentation. It is recommended that you choose some aspect of your project (like a major block from your block diagram) and present the design, requirements, and verification for that block. In order to get relevant feedback on your presentation skills, your mock presentation should also have an introduction (where the project is introduced) and a conclusion that wraps everything up. You will receive feedback on both your delivery, the format of your slides, and the organization of your presentation.

Your slides should generally include:

  1. Title slide: Names, group #, title.
  2. Introduction slide: What is the project?
  3. Objective slide: What problem does this solve?
  4. Design Slides: A few slides on design, requirements and verification (should include block diagram, math, graphs, figures, tables).
  5. Conclusion: Wrap things up, future work.

Mock presentation is graded credit/no credit based on attendance and apparent effort; showing up completely unprepared will earn no credit. An example mock presentation can be found here: example mock presentation

Submission and Deadlines

Sign-up is handled through PACE. Time slots are 1 hour long, and multiple groups will share a time slot. This will give you an opportunity to give and receive feedback from your peers. You will be required to stay until all groups have presented and received feedback.

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.