BMG 2019 Grammarian Issue 2

8 What advice would you give to students beginning to study Systems Engineering? My advice would be to get the theory down early and read widely. Practice and experiment with all the concepts you learn in class and look at various projects being done by people like yourself, not only around the world, but your fellow classmates as well. Get inspiration from these projects and choose to do your own project reflecting what you can reasonably expect yourself to pull off in the time and with the resources that are available to you. Become fluent in the use of mechanical CAD software and electronic simulation/design and software tools - as the tool could not only come across as handy when developing the physical structure of your chosen project - but equip you for your endeavours even after school. And finally, above all, dream big and do something challenging. It will inspire you to do bigger and better things later in life. What inspired your Systems Engineering project? My systems engineering project was an evolution of previous projects completed in Mechatronics and early units of the course. I have a huge interest in music and play the piano. My Mechatronics projects were focused on musical sound synthesis instruments like the Theremin, granular synthesisers and programmable sound synthesis based on the Raspberry Pi. These projects taught me a thing or two about issues pertinent to generating high quality sounds with small 8 bit microcontrollers and latency issues with external inputs when an operating system like linux on a Raspberry Pi is involved. I had been reading about other efforts in the maker space and came across a small microcontroller board called a Teensy that was being used as sound processor for guitar effects and also an electronic tone wheel organ. The Teensy board supported sound generation through high quality signal processing paths and output through a dedicated digital audio converter operating at CD (compact disc) sampling rates. I had also wanted to explore touch type input and the Teensy processor was able to handle a limited number of capacitive touch inputs too. So from this set of resources, I looked at a musical instrument idea and proposed a synthetic version of a hang drum which is an acoustic percussion instrument, and tried to emulate it as closely as possible using electronics computing and touch paradigms. The hang drum is notoriously difficult to make and is likewise very expensive to buy as it involves painstaking adjustments to mechanical cavities in an otherwise smooth dome shaped shell of steel. Due to this, I felt the need to make something that could be more readily produced and played. And so was born the electronic handpan! This instrument can be infinitely customised for key tones and placement and allows quick changing of the scale in which the instrument is played, making it far more versatile than the original hang drum.