Smart Watch Metronome and Tuner

Two convenient apps that can tell tune and tempo from the flick of a wrist.

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Inspiration

There aren't a lot of useful smart watch apps out there; and as music enthusiasts, we wanted to develop apps with a useful interface that could provide an intuitive user experience for musicians and other music enthusiasts. Additionally, due to the annoyance of auditory-based metronomes, we wanted to employ a metronome that could use vibrations to help the user keep track of a given BPM (beats per minute).

What it does

The metronome makes use of 'haptic' sensors (vibrations) in the native Tizen OS in order to let the user feel the desired tempo they are looking for in intervals of beats per minute. The tuner reads a given frequency and hertz and determines its offset from the expected pitch (to help tune instruments).

How we built it

The metronome was written natively in C for Tizen OS (An example of Tizen OS is the Samsung Gear S2 Watch) The tuner was written natively in Java for Android Wear OS (An example of Android Wear OS is the Huawei Watch)

Challenges we ran into

On the metronome:

  • using the Tizen OS and the Tizen IDE was awful.
  • the samsung gear s2 was only to build through the wifi (no usb connection on Gear S2)
  • due to permission issues on fsu wifi, we had to resort to using a local hotspot for building on the native device
  • if the hotspot were to go down, the IDE would bug out and have to be restarted
  • issue where the watch would lock when left neutral, causing a short delay on the BPM

On the tuner:

  • getting all necessary libraries / frameworks (i.e: mainly trouble with the TarsosDSP (used for frequency detection))
  • setting up android studio properly for the first time
  • learning curve using an unfamiliar language and unfamiliar IDE
  • issues with getting android studio to recognize the watch

Accomplishments that we're proud of

On the Metronome:

  • being able to turn the BPM into real-time intervals
  • building a gui app on tizen with only c

On the Tuner:

  • conversion from frequency & hertz to familiar note names (A-G)
  • determining the offset from the expected pitch

What we learned

  • android studio
  • basic wearable app development for Tizen OS and Android OS
  • how to access hardware handlers on wearable devices

What's next for Smart Watch Metronome and Tuner

For the Metronome:

  • Tap touch
  • Ability to disable the metronome and re-enable it
  • Being able to change the meter (pattern of the beats)

For the Tuner:

  • more stable pitch detection (increase consistency of pitch detection to give the user a better experience)
  • remove excessive background noise for more accurate pitch detection

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