We are GEECS (Gretchen, Elena, Emma, Colvin, Sam), and welcome to our first POE blog!
Because our team has such a diverse set of backgrounds and learning goals for this class, we wanted to make sure that we chose a project that would allow all of us to do cool things. To kick off project ideation, we did the typical Olin thing: each team member got a pack of sticky notes and 5 minutes, and we came up with as many ideas as we could individually. We then shared our ideas with each other and organized them by project topic on a board. From there, we down-selected to a few ideas that we further fleshed out. To ensure that everyone would have a significant portion of the project, we listed each of the expected contributions for mechanical, electrical and software under the projects we were thinking about. This allowed us to get a better idea of how we would split up the work. From this table, we all found that we were most excited about one idea: building a robotic drummer.
We set our dream goals hopefully have two robotic arms that can rotate separately from each other to hit different drums on the drumset and a robotic foot to actuate the bass pedal. These systems will be controlled by a circuit that will be able to listen to an actual song and real time detect its underlying beat. This beat will then be passed to a control system which will tell the arms and foot when and what drum to play, as well as create filler beats for drum solos and general musicality.
In addition to our dream goals, we also set our MVP (Minimum Viable Product) goals for the project. To achieve an MVP, we decided as a team that we needed to have one arm and one foot that can each hit a specific drum, controlled by a beat detection circuit that detects a metronome with no musicality.
Because our team has such a diverse set of backgrounds and learning goals for this class, we wanted to make sure that we chose a project that would allow all of us to do cool things. To kick off project ideation, we did the typical Olin thing: each team member got a pack of sticky notes and 5 minutes, and we came up with as many ideas as we could individually. We then shared our ideas with each other and organized them by project topic on a board. From there, we down-selected to a few ideas that we further fleshed out. To ensure that everyone would have a significant portion of the project, we listed each of the expected contributions for mechanical, electrical and software under the projects we were thinking about. This allowed us to get a better idea of how we would split up the work. From this table, we all found that we were most excited about one idea: building a robotic drummer.
We set our dream goals hopefully have two robotic arms that can rotate separately from each other to hit different drums on the drumset and a robotic foot to actuate the bass pedal. These systems will be controlled by a circuit that will be able to listen to an actual song and real time detect its underlying beat. This beat will then be passed to a control system which will tell the arms and foot when and what drum to play, as well as create filler beats for drum solos and general musicality.
In addition to our dream goals, we also set our MVP (Minimum Viable Product) goals for the project. To achieve an MVP, we decided as a team that we needed to have one arm and one foot that can each hit a specific drum, controlled by a beat detection circuit that detects a metronome with no musicality.
