Project

# Title Team Members TA Documents Sponsor
1 Direct Music Synced LED Strips
 Daniel Vargas
Siyan Shaikh
William Reinhard
 William Zhang design_document1.pdf
design_document2.pdf
final_paper1.pdf
final_paper2.pdf
proposal1.pdf
Problem
Modern day LED strips that respond to audio are often inaccurate, delayed, and uncustomizable, ruining the experience. They use microphones to collect the audio information, often relying on cheap microphones, causing delays in light changes and poor sound pickup when compared to the actual sound output. They also do not react to different pitches, relying on total volume level. If there is pitch differentiation, it is between very few tonal regions, usually bass, midrange, and treble. This leads to basic outputs and simple display settings. Some strips also do not come with customizable outputs and colors, meaning you have to follow what the manufacturer wants.

Solution Overview
Our solution is to innovate and directly connect the music to the LED strips and use FFT analysis to pick out more pitch ranges to create a more immersive experience. We also want to enable a 3rd party method, such as an app through bluetooth or a remote, to create specific outputs, such as smooth transitions or blinking, as well as assigning colors to certain pitches. They can also add preference to certain pitch levels, such as emphasizing bass to be displayed more. We also want to attempt to emulate left/right distinctions to create a ‘surround sound’ of light.

Solution Components
Controller
FFT Analysis
Connecting an audio jack to a controller, most likely a Teensy 3.1, and using the software provided to create an FFT. Using this FFT we can find different frequencies and pick out which ones are more pronounced.

Output Specifications
We want to have 3 different specifications, type of output such as blinking, emphasis on what pitch range, and finally the overall volume level of the music. To prevent blending of pitch colors that would output brown/grey, the user can select a ‘theme’ of output colors, and amongst those pick out specific pitches if they choose.

LEDs
We want to use RGB LEDs to allow for easy customization of the lighting experience. This will also enable us to include color logic into our controller and not rely on certain strips being one color.

`Third Party UI
We would need to include a bluetooth component that could communicate with either a controller or smartphone app to select LED preferences.

Power
We would most likely need some AAA batteries to be connected, ultimately needing some sort of box to house the controller and power supply. Depending on power requirements, we will need to design a power distribution circuit to power the controller and LEDs separately.


Criterion for Success
Ideally, the LEDs would respond in real time to provided audio pitches and display assigned colors with varying intensity. LEDs should also be able to mimic sound direction by activating specific diodes based on aural location. To allow greater control of the LEDs, the user Interface allows users to create “Themes” to save color presets for tones.

Smart Frisbee

Ryan Moser, Blake Yerkes, James Younce

Smart Frisbee

Featured Project

The idea of this project would be to improve upon the 395 project ‘Smart Frisbee’ done by a group that included James Younce. The improvements would be to create a wristband with low power / short range RF capabilities that would be able to transmit a user ID to the frisbee, allowing the frisbee to know what player is holding it. Furthermore, the PCB from the 395 course would be used as a point of reference, but significantly redesigned in order to introduce the transceiver, a high accuracy GPS module, and any other parts that could be modified to decrease power consumption. The frisbee’s current sensors are a GPS module, and an MPU 6050, which houses an accelerometer and gyroscope.

The software of the system on the frisbee would be redesigned and optimized to record various statistics as well as improve gameplay tracking features for teams and individual players. These statistics could be player specific events such as the number of throws, number of catches, longest throw, fastest throw, most goals, etc.

The new hardware would improve the frisbee’s ability to properly moderate gameplay and improve “housekeeping”, such as ensuring that an interception by the other team in the end zone would not be counted as a score. Further improvements would be seen on the software side, as the frisbee in it’s current iteration will score as long as the frisbee was thrown over the endzone, and the only way to eliminate false goals is to press a button within a 10 second window after the goal.