Internet of Things Project - Music Teacher

Why ?

Music Education usually involves a student using several instruments. A student needs to log practice time which should meet a certain amount of time spent practicing with the instrument. This is usually done using a log book. The logbook usually needs to be initialed by the parent. ( Sometimes the parent does not really know if the student practiced or not.). So, the logbook usually gets signed by the parent but the student did not really practice. How can you verify this ? - You can record every practice via video (but you are going to need to watch the video in order to determine the amount of practice time) There must be a better way of logging music practice.
Music Practice Logbook

How to solve this issue ?

Good thing is that there is a lot of makers out there connecting things to the internet.  We can create a device that will log music practice so that we can see a summary of the length of practice every day.

Using a mic sensor, led lights , and a particle wifi board - I created a prototype that will log music practice. Here is a high level fritz of the circuit board I have created - the RGB led will light up RED - when the practice time is not met YELLOW - met half of the practice time GREEN- met the amount of practice time for the day. The other LED just indicates if the sound is being picked up by the sensor. The device code is here https://github.com/petabyte/IonT

Simple IOT Device




High Level Architecture of how the device talks to the server

As you can see in the diagram above I used a cluster of elasticsearch instances. Since we are logging a lot of events and only trigger a feedback using an aggregation of certain events, we need to find those events.

Technical Difficulties

Isolating sounds became an issue - specially an instrument like the piano which has wide spectrum can be difficult to identify
I can't tell if somebody is gaming the device - again based on sound isolation

Where can this fit?

I think a metronome manufacturer can easily fit this feature but they will need the backend service to log the practice time




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