Arduino Musical Instruments!

In two days, we created a musical instrument with Arduinos.  For the majority of us, it was the very first time we worked with circuits and had to do both hardware and software design.  Below are our presentations and demos of our projects.  Congratulations to Arjun and Jeffrey for their "Air Drums" and Nathan and Annie C for their "Octopus" instruments which earned them a tie for both the Faculty Choice and People's Choice recognition. Sarah, Annie M., and Jenny received an Honorable Mention.

Roland and Savannah

Soundboard Plus: Preset songs/tunes already on soundboard for you to enjoy.

Nathan and Annie - Faculty and People's Choice Awards

Octopus - Multiple buttons with respective notes when pressed, the lower half of the notes activate the Red Light, and the higher half activate the Blue Light. Pressing both black and white will play G. A button will playback what was previously played. Pressing the record button at the same time as the yellow will play the recording backwards.

John and Colin

Pianox7 - Press buttons to play music

Josh and Eric

Heptagonal piano - It uses the seven basic keys and formatting of a piano so kinds can learn to play simple tunes easily

Jeffrey and Arjun - *Faculty and People's Choice Awards

Air Drums - The air drums use proximity sensors to detect hand motion that is essential for playing the instrument. When a proximity sensor detects something, a note is played. The five sensors play different frequencies of sound. The five buttons on the arduino help "tune" the drums by changing the frequency of the sound depending on the distance away from the proximity sensor.

Jenny, Sarah and Annie M. - *Faculty's Honorable Mention

It's Light! - active using light/ adjust amount of light

Elizabeth and Irene

Irenabeth - By moving your hand closer to the sensor, more lights will light up and the note goes higher.

Arlete and Jennifer

Xiaofei and Steven

Week 2 Photos Part 2

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Update - End of Week 1

Last Friday, we had a guest speaker, Ryan Kastner (former Cluster 1 faculty). He shared some of the work that Explorers for Engineering (E4E) is doing. Ryan and Curt (our faculty) are also co-directors of E4E. Any misconception that computer scientists and engineers just sit in a lab in front of a computer was smashed when he shared with us their work which took them to places like nature reserves, Guatemala, and the Dominican Republic – just to name a few. They went to Guatemala to map out ancient Mayan tombs and create 3-D models of it. They will soon 3-D print these models and share them. Another fascinating project he shared was a “camera trap” to get pictures of animals in their natural habitat. There are challenges that they face in putting a camera out in the wild such as power. The devices can’t be plugged in and re-charging them frequently is unreasonable. The camera traps turn on when it “sees” an animal and continue to track its movements. We ended last week in lab presenting our AppInventor apps. Our presentations and demos will be available this weekend on our blog. Games such as Ghost Run and Dory Dash were made, as well as painting-based apps. Arlete and Steven were recognized by both the faculty and students for their “You Draw, I guess” app. Additionally, Xiaofei and Savannah were the People’s Choice Runner-Up for their “My Paint” app. Late Friday afternoon we began working on our Scribbler RoboArt projects. We quickly became engrossed in making our designs perfect but learned that they didn’t always behave the way we thought they would. We discovered that the battery strength sometimes played a role in the execution as did the surface our Scribblers drove on including securing the paper to the surface. We learned to adapt and become comfortable with Python (the language we program our Scribblers with). We presented our final RoboArt designs in the afternoon. Our demos from can be found on our blog by Sunday, July 24. Congratulations to Sarah and Xiaofei for the Faculty Choice award for having their Scribbler write out “Cluster One Rules”! Additionally, congratulations to Annie and Arjun for the People’s Choice Award for their Nike logo design!

Qualcomm Field Trip Photos

We had a great time checking out Qualcomm on Tuesday. We were prohibited from taking photos in the robotics and drone lab, but it was a lot of fun and very interesting! Here are some photos from our time there.

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Photos Week 1

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Photos Week 1

Faculty Bios

Professor Curt Schurgers
Curt Schurgers received his Ph.D. from UCLA in integrated circuits andsystems, and his MS in EE from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium (KUL). Before coming to UCSD in 2002, he was a lecturer at UCLA in VLSI System Design and a postdoctural associate at MIT. He also held research assistantships at UCLA Networked & Embedded Systems Lab and the Interuniversity Microelectronics Center (IMEC) in Belgium. From 2004 until 2010, he was an Assistant Professor at the ECE Department at UCSD, leading the Wireless Information Systems Lab. Since December 2010, he has been appointed as a Project Development Engineer at Calit2, leading a large NSF program on underwater networked systems.

Professor Diba Mirza
Diba Mirza is an Assistant Adjunct Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at UCSD. She received her Ph.D. and M.S. in Computer Engineering from the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at UCSD. Her research is in the field of embedded systems and sensor networks. She has worked as a researcher on multidisciplinary projects in the ECE and CSE Departments and in collaboration with the Scripps Institute of Oceanography at UCSD.

Teacher Fellow - Shirley Miranda
Shirley earned her B.S. in Computer Engineering at UCSD then worked as a software development engineer. Her continued volunteer work with high school students through the Greater San Diego Science and Engineering Fair (GSDSEF) inspired her to go into teaching. At the University of San Diego, she earned her M.Ed. focusing on technology in education. She has taught Statistics 1-2, AP Statistics, Robotics and AP Computer Science at Morse High School in San Diego. This is her tenth summer as a Teacher Fellow at UCSD COSMOS. She serves as the Director of the GSDSEF, is a member of the COSMOS Advisory Board and served on the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair’s Advisory Council. She has been recognized with the 2014 National Council of Women and Information Technology (NCWIT) Educator Award for her contributions to the computer science educational community. Additionally, she is the 2016 San Diego County Teacher of the Year. Shirley spends her free time writing and visiting the San Diego Zoo with her husband and two year-old daughter. She has published four books Falling, Winter Solstice,Wintering, and Springing of her Bits and Pieces series. She is currently writing her fifth book.