Team Contract Fulfillment

Description

The team contract fulfillment assignment is a document describing whether the obligations set out in the team contract were met. Project groups should write no more than 2 pages double spaced. This document should have five brief sections each of which corresponds to a section in the team contract:

Project Goals: This section should begin with a short description of what you planned on building at the start of the semester. What were the goals of your project? You should elaborate on whether these goals were met.

Expectations: This section should address whether the expectations set in the “Expectations” section in your team contract were met. Essentially, were the ground rules your team set out at the start of the semester followed?
Roles: At the beginning of the course, your team outlined roles as part of the team contract. Please describe what your roles are now and–if your roles changed–how they evolved as the semester progressed. Did you assign a leader? Were pieces of the project tackled as a group or individually? Why?
Agenda: How did your team make decisions about the project? How were goals set? When an issue with the project came up, how did your team plan to fix it?
Team Issues: This section should cover team-related issues that your group encountered during the course. What sort of problems did you run into? How were they dealt with? Was the process set out in the team contract followed? In hindsight could you have done things differently to have a better team experience?

Requirements and Grading

Each section is worth 4 points. Points are awarded based on thoroughness. A section that adequately addresses the questions above will receive 4 points.

Submission and Deadlines

The team contract fulfillment document is a group assignment and should be submitted on canvas before the deadline listed on the Calendar.

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.

Project Videos