Finally now that my semester is over and I have loads of free time, i will start writing about our wireless project-Virtual Drums using SunSPOTs. It all started when I first entered the Wireless Fundamentals class after a short vacation in India. I had attended my other two classes (full of people I didn’t know) in the afternoon. I was expecting to have no luck in this class either. When i entered the class i was so relieved to see Vijay in class. Though I saw a few familiar faces but they were just acquaintances. Then Dinesh entered and I remembered all the days in CSE Services. Dinesh and Vijay shared most of the courses so they had decided to do the project together. I asked Vijay if i could join them and he said okay. I was quite relieved I must say. Then Dinesh told me Shrikanth would also join our team. We had seen the earlier semester projects and were anxious to start working on the SunSPOTs.
How to start? We created a google doc and decided to add our project ideas in that. We decided on a server monitoring project wherein we use different sensors to detect intrusion, follow it using camera and send the videos/photos back to the administrator. Dr. Liu wasn’t very happy with the concept and he said it too easy(we thought we were over ambitious). Then we sent him few project concepts and hold him to select one. One interesting concept which i thought had lot of application was the automatic traffic signal based on the number of vehicles approaching the intersection.
But Dr. Liu had already made his mind on another project. Vijay sent me a link about new type of instruments using hand gestures which helps kids create music. So how can we create music using SunSPOTs. Guitar too tough, piano not possible, Drums hmmm. Drums can be easy. So Shrikanth and Vijay started searching for projects on music using sunspots. They found an interesting site : JFugue
But we just wanted to play midi files of different parts of a drum set. May be we can different intensities also. Once we found a java class which played midi files and the sounds we were ready to start. But we were scared how we would manage to code these devices. I personally had no experience working on a sensor device. Thanks to the “SunSPOT quick start tutorial” in NetBeans we got everything set, deployed the BounceBall demo. This is what we did on day 1. We also decided to meet every Tuesdays and Thursday for an hour.
Day 2: “We created music”, says Vijay. See the videos below for the results of day 2.
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