Senior Design Spotlight: Team Acoustic Gorillas
Despite the Purdue University campus shutting down in mid-March due to COVID-19, ECE senior design teams were still able to complete some impressive projects remotely. That includes Team Acoustic Gorillas, which consisted of students Ayhan Okcal, Jackson Davis, Jeyhun Nasibov, and Nicholas Doerry. The team worked together on a project called “Turn it up!”
The team designed and built a combination record player and audio visualizer. Using a series of designed amplifiers and filters, the device was able to play a record and produce audio through the connected internal speakers. A STM32F4 microcontroller allowed it to analyze the waveform being produced by the record and display an accurate visual representation of either the frequency or beats of the song. The display consisted of 140 individually addressable LED’s connected to the system’s microcontroller.
Okcal says senior design was rewarding.
“It was an amazing experience and a serious challenge to bring together all the knowledge we learned in the past four years to create a functioning product,” he says.
Davis says the most challenging part of the project was integrating the UART transfer of frequency data from the digital signal processing subsystem of our project (the subsystem responsible for analyzing waveforms and creating both FFT and beat detection data) to the display portion of the subsystem.
“I spent hours scouring online resources and debugging my microcontroller in order to properly and quickly transfer the large amount of frequency data that was constantly being produced by the playing song,” he says.
Davis agrees that working on the project was a valuable experience.
“It was great opportunity to sharpen both my leadership and teamwork skills in project framework,” he says.
Senior design is an important part of senior year for Purdue ECE students. Teams incorporate all of their previous coursework to take on a challenging engineering project. Students decide on a project and then design and test a system, component, or process to meet the goals they have set.