My teammate Nate and I are building an embedded audio looper for our project. This project is very different from any other I have worked on in this program. It involves a number of things that I knew existed peripherally to computer science and coding, but that I never thought I would be doing myself. For the first time in my life I have been working with breadboards, microcontrollers, potentiometers and soldering. I am a musician and I have a very small amount of exposure to soldering watching my friends solder loose connections in the wiring of my guitars and effect pedals. So I’m at least somewhat familiar with the basic idea. But actually doing it feels great! It makes me wonder why I haven’t done it before. It will save me money with guitar/pedal maintenance if I stick with it and keep practicing. I definitely feel good about learning to solder.

Learning to build the project hardware has been even more rewarding. It’s a good feeling to connect something I worked on with my hands to my computer and have it playback music which I can manipulate via knobs and buttons. This is not anything new obviously, but it’s different when you build it yourself. That seems to be part of the appeal of embedded microcontroller projects. The other major part being what you can do with such powerful microcontrollers. There are all sorts of interesting things you can build, such as LED light controllers, kitchen timers, and fire alarm systems. As a musician, I am very pleased that my introduction to this technology/hobby is an audio looper. I plan on continuing to work on embedded microcontroller projects, because it is very satisfying and fun!