Complex Kinect Blog

After our first design review, we knew that we needed to spend some time reflecting and planning for the upcoming sprints. We started by personally reflecting for five minutes on post-it notes coming up with plusses and deltas. Then we went around and explained our ideas and thoughts. A few trends came from this: We liked that, when work was divided, we all got what we needed done, and in time We liked the persistent nature of our team as a whole to pull through and get stuff done while respecting each other and communicating our ideas and opinions well. We need to work on team bonding so that we have fun as a team outside of the classroom/meeting space. We need to be more diligent in our documentation and Asana task assignments so that we can better communicate what needs to be done. After spending this time reflecting, we planned out our current spring outline and have plans moving forward!

Looking back on sprint one and moving forward on sprint two Sprint One During sprint one we worked on laser cutting a frame to suspend the hanging balls before we pivoted. We also started working individually on the design where rather than moving up and down the nodes would open and close to show different movements. We thought that making the nodes open and close would fit better with our design goals of growing our mechanical skills as moving the balls up and down wasn’t as difficult as we had originally anticipated. At the end of sprint one we had a lot of sketched ideas for a new node design and katya had fabricated an awesome opening and closing mechanism based on the design of an umbrella. PIVOT! Start of Sprint Two We pivoted and changed our mechanical design from a grid of balls on strings moving independently to opening and closing nodes that are mounted on a wall and react the the environment around them. On the mechanical team we spent time playing with diff...

This afternoon Vicky and I researched ways to perform motion detection. Our two main options were sensors or cameras. After considering which method would grant more opportunity for iteration and which excited us more in terms of our learning goals, we decided to go with a camera. We're excited to work with OpenCV software to iteratively develop software that detects motion around our structure. Next, we researched which camera would be most effective and still within our budget. We decided on a 5 megapixel Arducam that interfaces with a Raspberry Pi. It should be coming in on Monday! - Gracey

As part of sprint one, we have decided to use the microphones on a computer to derive instructions for the mechanical system to raise and lower a small array of balls.To derive these instructions, we are working on doing some signal processing to find the amplitudes of certain frequencies throughout the signal. To do this, we are utilizing a fourier transfer. With this data, we can rank-order the frequency-amplitude pairs and move certain balls according to a proportion of the amplitude.

Today Peter and I worked on reading and interpreting audio signals using pyaudio. We made use of functions from Allen Downey's ThinkDSP book to help us extract frequencies and magnitudes for .wav files. We were able to graph the distribution of the frequencies and their magnitudes and were able to see a difference when we recorded a sound with a low frequency and one with a higher frequency. Our next steps are going to involve figuring out how we can extract useful information (frequency with highest magnitude) as our code is running. We might also try to use threading so that we can be recording and interpreting sound data at the same time.  - Vicky