Progress slot 2: further board testing, data-analyzing program development and music effect testing

1. Further board testing

We proceeded to work further on board testing after we've finalized our project idea, in order to build up individual sensing parts to be combined into the DJ table later on.

The OpenCapSense board with the eight ports connected to respective sensors

In our project, we are going to make use of the maximum of eight sensors altogether for the gesture sensing and parameter controlling. Unlike in the past, we this time fully utilized the ports to develop a best motion sensing effect under the hardware limitation.

Four of the sensors

Testing of the motion sensing effect

2. Data-analyzing program development

Whilst we were working on the hardware part, we were in a mean time also developing our program for the data mining and data analysis. We realized the limitations of our current program - it reads data instantaneously from the eight ports and updates the data values in real time. However, with only raw data, it is impossible for us to observe any meaningful trends/ draw any conclusions. Besides, it is also not accurate to link user actions to the increase/ decrease in amplitudes of the waveforms as the change in waveform amplitudes are affected by a groups of factors (e.g. surface area of the approaching object, climate). We understand that if we want to find out the relationship between waveform patterns and the actions of the users, the only way is to relate the actions to the change in pattern trends instead of the change in absolute values (i.e. to analyze in an analog manner).

This is why we worked to optimize our program - we wanted to include real-time data analysis to be shown in line graphs in order to analyze user actions and assign meaningful system reactions to create music effects.

UI of our latest program

With the new function on the bottom part of the box, we can now directly find out the change in trends when a certain action is carried out. This is going to be crucial to our project development.

3. Music effect testing

Apart from the hardware and analyzing parts, we've also been working on some music effect testing. We wrote C# programs to create a UI that allows importing and playing of songs. We also included the volume changing function in our program, and it succeeded when we tested it on our OpenCapSense kit.