About the project

IMUsic is a set of wireless wearable devices meant to provide dancers and musicians with the ability to create live music through physical movement. These devices strap onto a performer’s wrists and ankles, record orientation data, and generate music using this data through a virtual synthesizer environment. Various musical characteristics such as pitch, volume, panning, and background music may be controlled by these devices.

This was a project I collaborated on with a great team of engineers for our Senior Design at UIUC, where we won the ECE 445 Hall of Fame Runner Up Award for a well designed and novel project. We were also invited to showcase our project at the Instrument Design Fair alongside Music Technology graduate student projects.

Project Video

Award

Design

The schematic incorporates sections from SparkFun's ESP32 Thing breakout board schematic, namely, the circuits for the: USB-to-Serial Converter, Voltage Regulator, Auto-Reset, Reset button, GPIO0 Button, and the RTC Crystal Oscillator. The circuits for the Li-Po Battery and Voltage Regulator were modified to accommodate an on-off switch and removal of the battery charging circuit.

PCB Versions

Controllers

Documentation

Instrument Design Fair Poster

This poster was designed by Kuang Wang from a picture he took of our dancer test subject using one of the controllers. The dancer specializes in Scottish and Irish Dance styles, which made for an interesting and educational testing session of our controllers. This session made us aware of several areas for improvement, the most notable of which are: the need for a smaller form factor to allow for better mobility, and the need for a better GUI to allow an easier change in parameter range and mapping.