Since my last post my teammate and I have made substantial progress for our senior project. We have been meeting weekly to discuss project requirements and how to tackle them. There has been quite a bit of research within our project. Discussing things like what type of hardware we would use and how we would be able to interact with it. We chose to go with the Teensy 4.1 micro-controller, which happens to have been developed and produced by OSU alums Paul Stoffregen and Robin Coon.
Teensy 4.1 is a micro-controller that will be used to handle the input and output of our audio data, user interaction, and is more or less the brain of our project. Since there isn’t a ton of onboard memory on the Teensy, memory management is crucial for our audio loop station. Being that, we decided to use a fast compiled language that is great at managing memory. After discussing with my team mate we decided to use C/C++ which offers great performance and memory management. Within our system software we will be processing audio files through the read and write capabilities of C/C++. Reading from an array of bytes and processing those bytes to an audio output.
Our audio loop station is going to be an absolutely fun and challenging thing to create. The audio loop device will allow a user to record audio from an input device like a microphone. It will then be able to playback that audio while giving the user the ability to add effects to modify the sound of the audio playback. Processing the audio and adding effects is going to be the most challenging part of our project, but I know me and my teammate will crush it!. I also am looking forward to working with circuit boards, specifically learning how to solder components to circuit boards. I have done quite a bit of soldering through my current profession, but at a much larger scale, mostly dealing with wires that you would see under the hood of an automobile. Handling the hardware is something that I’m already familiar with, as I’ve been tinkering and building my own PC’s since high school.
In other news life has been good. I’ve been trying to play disc golf with friends while the weather is still somewhat calm here in Oregon. We are hitting the cold and rainy winter months which means the opportunities to play are dwindling. I tend to watch a lot of NBA and NFL in my free time, with friends or in my cozy apartment. Basketball season started recently and the Portland Trail Blazers are looking great. They finally have a forward named Jerami Grant, who has been killing it. In my opinion Portland hasn’t had a good forward since LaMarcus Aldridge left after the 2014-15 season. Anyways, I hope these winter months treat you all well. Until next time.
Brahm
