Sound Supervisor

Printed Unit 1
GIF
demo gif
Outer housing Model
Printed Unit 3
Printed Unit 2

Inspiration

Familiar with the volume mixer in windows? It allows users to control the volumes of the individual applications currently running on a given computer. It is a great feature of the OS, but can be a hassle to use when using fullscreen applications, or when you have a lot of windows open.

What it does

Sound Supervisor gives the user control of the volume mixer in the real world, with a small usb peripheral device. Users assign applications to knobs on the face of the physical device, which enables them to control the volumes of individual applications in the real world. Instead of having to alt-tab out of your development environment to change the volume of your music, you can now use Sound Supervisor to do it without missing a beat.

How I built it

Using an arduino and a C# application, we were able to implement this volume mixer in hardware. On the arduino side, the analog signal from each of the potentiometer is filtered for noise, and then transmitted over a serial port to the computer. When it arrives in the from-scratch built C# application, the data is parsed. Once the data is parsed, the C# application makes windows kernel calls in order to modify the volume for a specific process.

Challenges I ran into

The windows kernel is very stratified, and audio is handled very differently from windows xp to vista to 7 and so on. Finding a way to control process volume across installations was very difficult, but making it happen was very satisfying, and will produce a pretty useful little device.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Going from nothing, to a fully formed hardware peripheral with a supporting desktop application in less than 24 hours was really difficult. The team got lucky, in that we ran into no major development roadblocks and could start focusing on polish with some time to spare.