ECE 280/Summer 2024

This will be a page to keep track of updates to the ECE 280 lab manual during Summer 2024.

• June
  • All labs converted to single-file
  • Philosophy: convert sections to look like ECE 110
    • ECE 110:Abstract, Objectives, Background, Pre-Laboratory Exercises, Pre-Laboratory Assignment, Equipment, Experimental Exercises, Exploration, Assignment
    • Proposal: Purpose, Pre-lab Exercises, Pre-lab Assignment, Lab Exercises, Lab Report
  • Added code to counters to give n/N values with N being the total (I am more proud of this than I should be, really...)

Lab 0

v1->v2 recommendations

• In the Pratt Pundit section about MATLAB installation, it might be helpful to replace where it says that the installation will be 12 GB with a range, something like 8-12 GB, since when Adam and I installed we ended up with different sizes that were both less than 12GB.
  • Done
• We also thought it might be helpful to make installing MATLAB a part of the prelab deliverable—our idea was to have the prelab deliverable to be a Gradescope submission where students upload/submit something along the lines of: the selfie they took in front of the lab door, a screenshot of MATLAB booted up, and a textbox submission where they type in the toolboxes they installed (we often have an issue where students don't read the pundit closely enough, and so they end up having to reinstall MATLAB halfway through the semester to get a toolbox they forgot to install at the beginning).
  • Done - I kept the tutorial as part of the in-class but added the installation to the pre-lab. Also - people should certainly not need to reinstall MATLAB if they are missing a package - there's an easy way to add packages later. I have added that to the MATLAB page.
• In general, we thought it might be good to standardize formatting of lab manual sections similarly to how the ECE 110 lab manuals are, to have the sections: Purpose, Pre-lab Exercises, Pre-lab Assignment, Lab Exercises, and Lab Report, and to have those be uniform across all of the lab manuals for the class (with the potential addition of something like a Background section).
  • I am going to see if I can make Labs 0 and 1 fit into the full ECE 110 format; if not, once we decide on the sections, I will work to map things into those.
• Finally, we thought it might be good to add a portion to the lab that gets into LaTeX and basic functionality and guidelines for writing lab reports—I feel like 280 is kind of the class where you're meant to really learn how to write lab reports, but a lot of people find that overwhelming, so providing an intro and establishing some basic standards would be really helpful. In particular, we were thinking that this could be turned into a post-lab deliverable, maybe something where we have students upload a "lab report" written in LaTeX with all of the basic sections that are used in the subsequent weeks of lab, plus maybe they have to put in an equation or insert a photo (maybe the certificate of completion of the MATLAB onramp course?) in the Results and Discussion section, sort of the equivalent of a "hello world" for the skills they need to write relatively polished lab reports in LaTeX.
  • Now that EGR 105 is in place (and since students could have skipped EGR 103 for the last five years) we will have a good number of students who may have never seen LaTeX (AFAIK no other class before ECE 280 actually requires it). I don't know if students would need the full "EGR 103 Lab 1" treatment. I am going to leave this as a future deliverable for now once I get a better idea of how the section remapping works

Lab 1

v1->v2 recommendations

• We thought it might help to format the second paragraph of the Purpose section in bullet points—the paragraph format we thought makes it easy for students to skip over reading it and get confused about what they're meant to be doing each week.
• In the third sentence of section 2.1: the phrase "in using a number" is a bit confusing, maybe something like "The octave each note is in should be denoted by a number. Higher numbers indicate higher overall pitches." would be more clear.
• Figs 1 and 2 have somewhat poor image quality; it might be worth updating them.
  • Also for Fig 1 specifically, if updating it would be good to use an example that already has a treble clef in the photo. We could even use a software like Musescore or something similar to manufacture an example—it could still be Beethoven's Fifth, or it could be something else
• In sentence 2 of section 2.2: there's an extra "the" before the word "mainly."
• In the second-to-last sentence of 2.2, "Note that...": I don't think it's really necessary for them to know that the piece is written in C minor—all they need to know is that the key signature denotes which pitches are "automatically" sharp or flat, and I worry that the extraneous information without much explanation might overwhelm people who don't know much about music.
• Sentence 2 of paragraph 2 of 2.3: this sentence feels somewhat incomplete. An extra phrase would help, something like "a quarter note has twice the duration of an eighth note, which has twice that of a sixteenth note, and so on" or "a quarter note has twice the duration of an eighth note and half the duration of a half note and so on"
• Sentence 4 of paragraph 2 of 2.3: "scare" should be "score"
• 2.4 OVERALL: Would it make sense to design a Pratt Pundit page with a more in depth explanation of different effects and their implementations in MATLAB? We could also include links to different references that we normally include in the lab slideshow or the Canvas page.
• 2.4, overlapping tones, sentence 3: "advance" should be "advanced"
• 2.4, harmonics, paragraph 1 last sentence: this should be turned into a note, with the same formatting as the other notes have (i.e. bolded, "NOTE" in all caps)
  • Also somewhere in this section, it might be worth noting that different combinations of amplitudes for each harmonic can correspond to certain instruments students might be trying to synthesize, and maybe adding a link to this page (it's already linked on Canvas, but might be worth having everything in the lab manual).
  • And, similarly, a link to this page could be added to instrument synthesis in 2.4. If a Pratt Pundit page is created, then both links could be included there instead.
• 2.4, harmonics, paragraph 2 sentence 1: the second part of this sentence is kind of unclear, replacing it with something like "any signal can be expressed as a sum of sin and/or cos waves" might bring the point home a bit more efficiently for students
• 2.4, instrument synthesis, sentence 4: "where as" should be one word
• 2.4, reverb, sentence 2: "ceiling" should be plural to match the other words in the list
• 2.4, reverb, second-to-last sentence: the space in the parenthetical before "300" should be deleted
• 2.4, reverb, last sentence: "on the next page" should be changed to "in the next section."
• 2.5: The parentheticals "(loudness)" and "(post-echo)" seemed somewhat unnecessary to us.
• 2.5, sentence 4: there should be a "the" inserted before "echo's."
• 2.5: The formatting of the question about the causality of the system in parentheses disrupts the flow of reading—could this be reworded to be a statement? Something like "Consider what this indicates about the causality of the system."
• IN GENERAL: it might be worth considering separating the background into two sections: Week 1 Background and Week 2 Background.
  • The same applies for the instructions (in which case we should add in a note that if a student used "Mary Had a Little Lamb" or a different song that they don't want to submit as their final song, they should generate a note vector for their final song before proceeding with step 7.
• Instructions #1 sentence 1: The parenthetical should be adjusted and integrated more into the sentence, and "approximately" should be taken out, something like "Make sure that your score is a reasonable length—your final score should be 30-60 seconds—and have a source from which..."
  • The parenthetical in the first note can also be deleted (not all video game music is computer generated, and also I think people generally understand what it means for music to be computer generated)
  • Also, formatting between notes should be kept consistent, i.e. one shouldn't be italicized if the other isn't
• Questions in the instructions should be altered to be checkpoints followed by a deliverable, e.g. "Checkpoint (1): Explain to your TA why the endpoint in the example time vector above is 1 - 1/f_s, instead of 1" followed by "Deliverable: Write up your answer to the question above and include it in the Discussion section of your lab report," or have a deliverable at the end of the instructions that reads something like "Deliverable: Write up your answers to the questions addressed in Checkpoints N - M and include them in the Discussion section of your lab report."
  • Also, these checkpoints shouldn't be interrupt the text of the instruction. For example, in #2, rather than the checkpoint coming before the sentence beginning with "You may change...", it should go after the note.
• #4, sentence 1: saying "rests or silent portions" implies that there are silent portions in musical scores which aren't rests, might be better to use a parenthetical, something like "For the rests (silent portions) in your score..." or a similar expression.
• #4, HINT: worth noting that I don't think most students use this hint. Most of them just use whatever method they've already established for generating notes, but setting the amplitude value to 0, so I'm not sure how necessary including it is.
• #5, sentence 2: the parentheses can be replaced with a semicolon: "after repeated notes; otherwise, the three..."
• #5, last two sentences: It's worth considering shortening the interesting side note. I think the last sentence could be cut, and the overall meaning would be preserved. The phrase "Interesting side note" could also be deleted; we thought it would serve the same purpose if it starts with "Theoretically,...."
• A checkpoint could be added after #6 prompting the student to play what they have for the TA
• #s 7-9 cover a lot of ground, so it may be helpful to create a set of checkpoints that covers them to let students touch base with the TA and to let the TA get insight into how the students are doing
  • This could look like a checkpoint after 9 that prompts the student to play the TA their song before and after modification and explain how/why it was improved
  • Or could look like a checkpoint after each step (7, 8, and 9) and then a deliverable after 9 that prompts them to write up an explanation of how each effect affected (haha) the sound - this could get at the first item in the discussion section of their lab report
  • The question currently after 8 could be wrapped up into a deliverable (potentially as part of the one after 9), or it could be turned into a note, rather than a question
• #9: parentheses around "Watch your amplitudes!" are unnecessary - these could be removed
• section 4 (lab submission) generally: Each bullet point has a lot of sentences; I'm not sure that students will read through them as carefully as would be ideally as is. Would it be possible to break these down any further?
• section 4, sentence 2: should be a comma after "final array, y"
• sect. 4, sentence 3: potentially consider changing "Example" to "e.g." for consistency with the rest of the lab manual
  • Same thing for "For example, Huettel_Twinkle.wav” in sent. 6
• sect. 4, sentence 4: should be "between -1 and 1" (not "1 and -1") for consistency
• sect. 4, second bullet: this should also be broken up more. Much of it I think could be worked into a deliverable maybe at the end of the instructions
• IN GENERAL FOR SUBMISSION: I think it might be worth trying to figure out an alternative to Canvas or Box for file submissions
  • we could use the "online assignment" option on gradescope for more flexibility, or we could have two assignments on gradescope for this lab: one for the lab report and another for file drop (the same could apply for the image processing labs and in general for when we have them submit large chunks of code that are potentially awkward in-line in lab reports)