Robot Symphony - Things to Consider (Week 8)

Tweaks & Perfections

     

     We want our project to be the best that it can be in time for the performance. As such, we are taking this week to consider how it can be made better, and we will be sharing those thoughts with you all.

Note Accuracy-

The project has to be able to play without falter, since it is a melodic instrument that is being expected to play most of the notes in the song. As you might remember from last week's video, there was one note that was unable to play in the set of notes. Instead of ringing out clearly, the note was botched, and there was a clicking sound rather than an actual note. To fix this, we've adjusted some values in the code, but in the spirit of getting better, we've viewed some other videos of our type of project to see how they've overcome this problem.

 

 This video shows a well made automatic xylophone that uses solenoids as well as Phidget (similar to Arduino) to control them. This project is nice because the solenoids have no room for mistakes. They either move up or down, and typically strike with the same force every time. However, this project differs from ours because you would need a solenoid for each note, so in our project, we would need 17 solenoids. At that point, it becomes more worth it to have a few mallets that can be used with servo motors.

Latency-

Since our xylophone will be donned with the task of playing the songs melody, we have to look into reducing the latency between the time when a note is called, and a note is hit. The fix shouldn't be too hard, but again, it will require more numbers to be changed in the code. You might have seen in last weeks progress video that the starting position for the mallets on the project was extremely high. This is due to the servo motors natural resting position, but by changing that position, we can reduce the swing down time, effectively reducing the latency. Again, comparing it to the project that utilized the solenoids, we can see that the solenoids are directly above the keys, and can strike them very quickly. Still, due to the drawbacks of having so many solenoids that were mentioned earlier, the mallets and servos still hold strong.

Portability-

Although we've gone ahead and put all components of the project onto a peg board, we still think that the project can be a hassle to carry around and set up. We think we will be doing ourselves some good if we reduce the size of the project. That will make it smaller and less of a hassle, decreasing the chances of it dropping or running into other things. As such, we've considered cutting the board in such a way that only the necessary pieces have a space on the board.

We have many things to consider, and are gearing up for our final weeks. We'll see you all in week 9.