Magpie MIDI Project: My experience with the Hackaday Prize 2020
About four months ago, Pato and I embarked on a design challenge by the United Cerebral Palsy Los Angeles to design adaptive devices for creative expression as part of the Hackaday Prize. It’s incredibly exciting for us to announce that the Magpie MIDI Project was selected as one of the 24 finalists and awarded Honourable Mention. Although there is much more work to be done, this is a huge milestone for us and we’re excited to keep on pursuing this project. This video is a summary video we created which will hopefully give a good overview of what this project is about.
To keep up to date with this project as well as to see detailed posts about how we have gotten here, please visit our Hackday project page at this link: https://hackaday.io/project/174136-adaptive-midi-interface-harmonica/. Feedbacks and comments are always welcome!
This project began in mid-July of this year when I discovered the Hackday Prize on Hackaday.com. The Hackaday Prize this year partnered up with four different non-profit organizations to tackle the very real issues they are facing in everyday operation. Finding this prize was great timing because I had been staying at home most of the time during my summer holidays (between my transition from high school to university), and I was beginning to get a little bored. I had also wanted to create something useful, not just for me but for others and I felt that participating in one of the challenges was a great way to start.
Starting this project also gave me a great opportunity to work with my friend Pato whom I met during my internship at Safecast in Japan last year. Pato Montalvo is from Mexico and he currently works as an electrical engineer at an electrical equipment manufacturing company. His expertise and experience have helped this project to move forward and I would like to thank him for this. It was also great to work as a team and have somebody to hold myself accountable to.
For the rest of this post, I would like to share some of the experience I gained in both technical and soft skills aspects and finally conclude with a reflection on this project so far.
Technical Experience and Skill Development
So as a proud computer geek, I’ll start off with mentioning some of the interesting technical skills I developed.
EDA and PCB designs
So, I did have some first-hand experience with designing circuits using EDA softwares; however, this was my first major project to utilize an EDA software to design circuits and go from my circuit ideas to a CNC milled circuit board or a manufactured PCB. My experience with this has not been entirely successful nor easy. My first attempt at CNC milling the circuit for Magpie MIDI turned out to be a horizontally mirrored version of what was actually needed to mount all the electronic components. My first and only attempt so far to order PCBs ended up with many mistakes that had to be fixed by hand. But I learnt a lot along the way and I now feel somewhat comfortable using Autodesk Eagle to go from a circuit diagram to a manually routed circuit board, and from a circuit board design to ordering PCBs online using Gerber files. Rome wasn’t created in a day and so my EDA skills are not going to be perfect in one project. But I now have a good idea of how everything works and I’m ready to experiment more!
GUI and Programming EEPROM on SoCs via Serial
This was another aspect of the project that was quite new to me. To make Magpie MIDI more user friendly, I wanted to design a dedicated software that could rewrite the settings for what each of the air holes did. For example, if a user wanted to change the music scale, this could be done via an intuitive GUI rather than changing lines of code. Then this software would send AT command style instructions via serial to the Arduino Leonardo. So far I have the GUI as well as the serial EEPROM writing program working separately, but it’s not working together yet. The GUI is written with Tkinter; however, in the near future, I want to experiment with more Javascript frameworks so that the GUI can run on Electron JS.
Experience with MSLA/SLA 3D Printers
This project was also the first time I used an MSLA printer to fabricate some of the components used in the Magpie MIDI. I had only recently bought the Elegoo Mars Pro 3D printer for about ¥3,5000JPY (approx. $340USD) and I was looking forward to using this printer in my projects. The first design of the Magpie MIDI had a couple of components that were more suitable to be printed by an MSLA printer, so this was a great way for me to get started with SLA printing. At first, I was kind of overwhelmed by the number of software settings on the slicing software (Chitubox), but everything turned out to be much easier than I expected. Although I did experience a few minor problems from some prints, I’m really happy overall with the quality and ease of use the Elegoo Mars Pro is able to offer, especially for its relatively low price. I’m definitely looking forward to using this printer in my future projects.
Soft Skills Development
Since this project was done as a team, I want to take a moment to reflect back on the communication and other soft skill aspects that I felt were important in moving the project forward.
Working Remotely on a Hardware Project
Before embarking on this project, I imagined that working on a hardware project would not be much different from working on essays or other school assignments as a team online without meeting in-person as I had done before. Many software companies also seemed to have had a relatively smooth transition from working in offices to working from homes. I imagined that Pato and I would work on the project with shared documents, video calls, messaging apps and this collaboration feature on Fusion 360 (sort of like Google Docs collaboration thing).
But wow, I underestimated the productivity I enjoyed when we were all able to meet people face to face. First of all, I found it more difficult to describe specific hardware features I had in my mind. Sure, we could share our screens, but encountering technical problems, like when I thought I was sharing my screen but wasn’t actually being shared, just took away that critical moment where I had finished trying to explain or describe specific things.
Of course, more problems arose as we started working on actually fabricating the device. Since I was making the device either at my local maker space or my closet workshop at home, there was no way for Pato to actively contribute to the hardware development after the design stage. We tried collaborating through video calls, but speaking and listening via video calls can only go so far before either of us wanted to reach out our hands and fix whatever hardware issue we were trying to resolve.
I do have a few ideas on how we could improve productivity for remotely collaborated hardware projects; to get the workflow as close to working in-person as possible. It may be far fetched, but maybe an augmented reality system to allow team members to collaborate on hardware components from anywhere wouldn’t be such a bad idea. Oh, what about that robot arm helper they showed in the Iron Man film? I don’t know, but this project made me realize that our WFH (work from home) culture may need more work especially for hardware-based projects.
Learning Project Management Skills
This project was also a good opportunity to learn basic project management skills. The Hackaday Prize required us to write at least 10 project logs and document our progress. As Pato has experience in working at an electrical engineering company, he was able to teach me the conventions hardware development projects follow to document progress. Notable aspects we focused on was writing our CTQ (critical to quality) analysis and documenting our components in a BOM (bill of materials) document.
CTQ Analysis: CTQ analysis (critical to quality analysis) is about finding specific and measurable requirements from a specific need. In this case, the “need” was a way in which individuals with cerebral palsy and other physical disabilities could express their creativity. Pato and I categorized the requirements into five categories (known as “drivers”) where we further specified the specific requirements. In the end, I don’t feel that we have met all the criteria, but the good thing is that, with this CTQ analysis, I know what improvements must be made.
BOM Document: When Pato first explained to me about BOM documents, I thought to myself that this is something I’ve always done in my past projects. However, when he explained further and showed me an actual BOM document he used at work, I realized that there were so much more for me to learn. Through documenting our project BOM more extensively than I have done in the past, I was able to learn about how the numbering system of the components are decided and how this relates to the final assembly and its associated technical drawings. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, this article explains the features of BOM documents to good detail.
Conclusion
Overall, I’m happy that I’ve learnt a lot from working on this project and that Pato and I were able to be recognized for participating in the Hackaday Prize. What I’m happier about, however, is from knowing that I was able to work on a project that has the potential to help out individuals with disabilities. Although many of my past projects have been interesting, stupid, fun and (sometimes) useful, I feel that this project has the most potential to be helpful to other people to this date.
Thorugh researching for the project and trying to use the device from the position of a disabled individual, it gave me an opportunity to think about how my passion for applying technology could help people with disabilities. I have come up with two more project ideas that could also potentially help in this field. The two projects will require more research and skill development from my side, but I’m already in the phase of writing out the long-term plan for one of the ideas. I mentioned one of the ideas in one of my past logs here. But at the very least, working on this project has created a spark of interest for me to contribute more to disability tech in the future.
Footnote
I want to take a brief moment, in the end, to give a huge thank you to Osamu Yamamoto and his staff from Fablab Kamakura for his invaluable technical advice, Aragna Ker from the UCPLA for the valuable feedback he has given us and Majenta Strongheart from Hackaday for her clear guidance.
