Summary of Meeting 11SEP2015

On 11SEP, I met with my project supervisor, Professor John  Spinelli. We discussed many things, the most prominent of which was the use of a small chip known as the femptoduino. We both agreed that the first step in this project was to simply gather some data from an accelerometer before starting anything too terribly complicated. This would allow us to determine a few things: 1) how precise of an algorithm is needed to detect the strong downward motion of a downbeat and 2) whether the device needs to know which way is down in space in order to detect downbeats. Professor Spinelli purchased a femptoduino and some apps over the summer and tested it out for some time before a bluetooth component failed. We discussed how much coding was required and Professor Spinelli mentioned that Nordic (the company that makes many bluetooth devices) has some software which users have permission to modify. I may make use of that and experiment with it in the coming weeks. A major challenge will be the setup of the bluetooth. Bluetooth is a fairly complicated system and operates through a master/slave system. In my project, the slave would be the wristband/accelerometer device and the master would ideally be in the tempo readout unit. However, it may be simpler in the long run to use a smartphone for the readout unit as it already functions as a bluetooth master. Some of the things I will be looking into this next week are filling out a Student Research Grant application and looking into more bluetooth-equipped chips. I will develop a fairly solid idea of what hardware I will be using and start to develop a more complicated block diagram.