Patrick Leung School of Engineering Science Simon Fraser University 8888 University Drive Burnaby, BC. V5A 1S6 Date 1/19/2009 Dear Mr. Leung, The enclosed document, Proposal for a Dynamic/Static Statue, outlines our proposed project for ENSC 440. The goal of our team is to design and implement an innovative musical ornament with potentials to be widely applied in various situations. This proposal will provide an overall insight about our product, design methology, sources of information, funding, and project budget. Moreover, the proposal also includes the project scheduling which can guide us to accomplish each millstone in order to achieve the final success. Mutrix Technology consists of five motivated, hard working, and talented fifth-year engineering students: Benson Lam, Gary Heng, Winfield Zhao, Shuozhi Yang and Weiguang Mou. If you have any questions or concerns about our proposal, please feel free to contact me by phone at (604)537-9289 or by e-mail at btl2@sfu.ca, or to contact the company by email at mutrixtechnology@gmail.com. Sincerely yours, Benson Lam President and CEO Mutrix Technology Enclosure: Proposal for a Dynamic/Static Statue
Proposal for a Dynamic/Static Statue Prepare for: Patrick Leung Steve Whitmore Prepared by: Benson Lam Gary Heng Winfield Zhao Shuozhi Yang Weiguang Mou Contact: mutrixtechnology@gmail.com Date: 1/19/2009 Revision: 1.5 2
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY As the technology advances days after days, the demand for traditional ornaments, such as picture frame, sculpture or bonsai, is gradually becoming saturated in the present market. Nowadays, consumer opts to buy digital picture frames, digital music boxes, digital decorative music fountains and music-reactive electronic animals (i-dogs, i-cats and i-turtles etc) over traditional ornaments to decorate their homes. However, due to the plain form and the impractical functionality of most of the music-related electronic devices, their durability will not last long in the fast changing modern life. Our project is to build a stylish and innovative dynamic music statue that allows the users to have an incredible visual experience while enjoying music. The dynamic design of our product provides infinitely many forms of 3-dimentional display. By providing colorful light effects on the display will significantly increasing the interestingness of the display. Besides the fantastic music experience, our product can easily become a customized modern art works, which designed by customers themselves through a simple user interface. The ease of use, the large possible variation of styles and the customizability of the display will highly expands the enjoyment of the product. Our company, Mutrix Technology, is composed of five senior engineering students in their fifth year of studies in Simon Fraser University. Each co-founder has different expertise in hardware, software and mechanic. They are going to apply their knowledge and skills to design the product, which involves the knowledge of hardware, software and mechanical design. With nowadays technology, our project is technically feasible and we have found all the components necessary for building the prototype. Significant components such as motors, micro-controllers, and gears and mechanical joints have all been listed and ordered. The first operational prototype will be designed and built within a 13- week period, starting from 5 th of January 2008. The cost to produce the first operational prototype will be limited within $1000. The cost will come from various sources such as funding of ESSS and co-founders. 3
TABLE OF CONTENTS Table of Contents... 4 List of Figures... 5 List of Tables... 5 1. Introduction... 6 2. System Overview... 7 3. Market Analysis and Existing Solutions... 9 3.1 Existing Solutions... 9 3.1.1 Digital Music box/statue... 9 3.1.2 Decorative Music Fountain... 9 3.1.3 Digital Picture Frame... 10 3.2 Limitation of Existing Products... 10 4. Proposed Solution... 11 5. Source of Information... 12 6. Budget and Funding... 13 6.1 Budget... 13 6.2 Funding... 13 7. Schedule... 14 8. Company Profile... 15 8.1 Team Organization... 15 8.2 Member Profile... 16 9. Conclusion... 18 10. Reference... 19 4
LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1 DreamBox Overview... 7 Figure 2 Dreambox Under Dynamic Mode... 8 Figure 3 Dreambox Under Static Mode... 8 Figure 4 Project Timeline... 14 Figure 5 Project Milestone... 14 LIST OF TABLES Table 1 Tentative Budget... 13 5
1. INTRODUCTION Consumer electronics are definitely one of the best selling products throughout the world. The Consumer Electronics Association estimates 2009 consumer electronics sales at 171 billion dollars. [1]This indicates there is a strong market in electronic products, especially home entertainment. The digital photo frame is a great example of home entertainment product. The digital frame is environmental friendly and greatly enhances the display of photographs. However, the drawback is that it is only a 2D display and very expensive. Another great home entertainment product is music fountain. There is a pre-programmed set of movements available when the music plays. In combine of the digital frame and music fountain, we are proposing a unique 3D entertainment system, the animated display, DreamBox. In this project, we will be focus on developing an animated display. The animated display, DreamBox, consists of 5x5 squares. Each square has a crystal standing tube and there will be led inside the tube as well. DreamBox has two modes of operation, a dynamic and static mode. The dynamic mode is operated by connecting a music box to our system. The music is then filtered and analyzed by using digital communication algorithms. By detecting various frequency harmonic, DreamBox can form different shapes of animation like wave, heart, smile, letters, and alphabets. In addition, there is also a static mode available in which the consumer can draw various shapes on the computer, and our software will try its best to convert the drawing to 3D shapes. This 3D shape is sent to DreamBox via a wireless communication device in real time. The static mode is very useful in the sense that it provides a way for the consumer to express his/her creativeness. At last, the forming of these shapes along with light effects will definitely make DreamBox one of the most popular home entertainment systems. 6
2. SYSTEM OVERVIEW Animation Display, DreamBox, opens the new era of home entertainment. DreamBox is capable of converting 2D computer shapes and additional specification to our 3D model display. This is called the static mode. Furthermore, DreamBox can follow the rhythm of the music and display various shapes correspondingly. Figure 1 shows the Solidwork model of DreamBox. FIGURE 1 DREAMBOX OVERVIEW Figure 2 shows the dynamic mode of the system. Any audio device such as the IPOD can be connected to DreamBox. The audio signal is split, delivering one to the speaker and the other one to the DreamBox. The DreamBox will display different pre-programmed 3D shapes depending on the frequency range. 7
FIGURE 2 DREAMBOX UNDER DYNAMIC MODE [5] [6] [7] Similarly, the static mode will display any shape drawn by the user. The user first draws the shape on the computer program. The program then simulates the best matching shape and transfers it wirelessly to the DreamBox. This is very convenient and creative way of displaying different shapes. Figure 3 shows the static mode of the DreamBox. FIGURE 3 DREAMBOX UNDER STATIC MODE There is a limitation to the number of available shapes the user can draw on the computer software. However, this is easily overcome by adding more cells to the display. The ideal number of cells is approximately 15 x 15. Our prototype only controls 5 x 5 square cells. 8
3. MARKET ANALYSIS AND EXISTING SOLUTIONS There is an increasing demand for home entertainment systems due to the pursuit for higher standard lifestyle. As a result, home artistic ornament market has become one of the most profitable markets in present and the near future. The uniquely designed small modern art work is one of the best choices for the customers who desire a special and enjoyable home entertainment experience. However, the demand for traditional ornaments, such as picture frame, sculpture or bonsai, is gradually becoming saturated in the market; therefore, digital multi-functional devices, especially the music-related small digital systems, are starting to gain a share of the home ornament market. 3.1 EXISTING SOLUTIONS There are plenty of small digital gadgets being developed due to the large demand in the home ornament market. However, the number of products that can keep up to date is very limited. As our research shows, the music-related home decorative designs present in the market can be classified into the following types. 3.1.1 DIGITAL MUSIC BOX/STATUE The digital version of music box/statue only works as an alternative to the traditional clockwork music box. [3] The plain form of music box/statue is getting boring in the fast changing modern life, while another issue is that the target customer of digital music box/statue is very limited. 3.1.2 DECORATIVE MUSIC FOUNTAIN Similar to the public music fountain design, small scale music fountain has become one of the interesting home decorative items, which can be placed in a room or in the backyard. As the music plays, the fountain shows various interesting pattern due to the flow of water by controlling the water pressure. [2] Also, some light effect is employed in the design to improve the visual experience of the users. [2] However, the control of the water is usually a problem because it could easily make a mess in the room, and the simple behavior of water might be boring after a period of use. 9
3.1.3 DIGITAL PICTURE FRAME Digital picture frame is said to be a great market success nowadays. With some simple picture display effect and MP3 music player support, digital picture frame dramatically attracts customers interest and creates huge profit in a short period. [4] However, violent market competition has also been formed due to the large popularity. Furthermore, digital picture frame sales are still based on the traditional picture frame market, so further market broadening is quite difficult. 3.2 LIMITATION OF EXISTING PRODUCTS The main issue of existing products in the market is the lack of the innovation. Most of the products are simply the digital version of the traditional form, which certainly can take the advantage of existing market; however, the lack of innovation definitely constrains the future market broadening. Therefore, in order to gain the profit from the growing entertainment and home ornament market, our product must break the limit of traditional ornament designs and form a brand new home entertainment concept. 10
4. PROPOSED SOLUTION Our proposed solution to the demand for home musical ornament is to build a stylish and innovative dynamic music statue, DreamBox, which allows the users to have an incredible visual experience while enjoying music. The dynamic design of our product provides infinitely many forms of 3-dimentional display according to the music s rhythm while the colorful light effect significantly increases the interestingness of the display. Besides the fantastic music experience, our product can easily become a customized modern art works designed by customers themselves through a simple user interface. The ease of use, the large possible variation of styles and the customizability of dynamic music statue highly expands the enjoyment of the product. DreamBox is a brand new idea and involves some modern artistic factors and popular technologies, such as Bluetooth, so that it cannot be simply considered as a modification of some other products. One of the concerns of this project is the prototyping cost and development timeline, because even the least significant component must start from scratch and no pre-designed component can be applied directly. In such a situation, the limited schedule and funding could be a big issue for us. To resolve the timing and budget issues, we will choose to use relatively economic materials and base our design on a comparably small scale but enough to clearly demonstrate the design of our concept. In the thirteen week time frame, we will mainly work on the digital system design and implementation, controlling mechanism and software user interface. Therefore, we have to carefully manage our time and distribute the work evenly to obtain the highest efficiency. In the future, our project can be further improved, and as can be noticed, our project is only a particular application of such design prototype, but it is not limited to this application. When there is sufficient fund and time for further development, this design can be simply expanded to larger scale, such as large public statue or concert decoration. 11
5. SOURCE OF INFORMATION In order to carry our idea into an exiting product, we need to obtain a huge amount of information from various sources such as: professors, teaching assistances, the internet, component manufacturer, academic papers and engineering journals. Professors, teaching assistances and the internet will be our first choice of sources of information because they are easiest for us to access and most knowledgeable. The manufactures of components, academic papers and engineering journals are our second choice of sources of information. Our project involves hardware, software and mechanical design; therefore, we need to gain the information from each field: hardware, software and mechanic. Moreover, we also need to gain the information about the market share and price of similar products from sources such as EBay and Amazon.com. First of all, Professor Patrick Leung will be our most valuable source for choosing hardware components that are suitable for our design. His knowledge and expertise in hardware design can help us in the circuitry and PCB design. We can obtain further more information about the components from the manufactures of components. Secondly, software design information can be obtained from the wild source of the internet. Last of all, Dr. Carlo Menon s expertise in robotic mechanical research make him to be our main resource for mechanical design for our project. He can provide valuable suggestions about our mechanical design for our project. Academic papers and engineering journals also can be our valuable sources of information. 12
6. BUDGET AND FUNDING 6.1 BUDGET Table 1 below shows the cost estimation details for the research and development of DreamBox. The costs have been overestimated by fifteen percent since it may vary as the development progresses. Also, in order to lower our budget, we plan to order some equipment from China. Equipment List Estimated Cost Microcontroller 300 25(+5) glass/crystal square tubes 50 appropriate power supply to handle motor power 50 wire/resistor/other circuit components 50 25 electrical motors 500 25 power amplifiers 200 LED s 20 Cover 100 Total Cost 1270 TABLE 1 TENTATIVE BUDGET 6.2 FUNDING We are currently applying for Engineering Science Student Endowment Fund (ESSEF) and hope they will support us to purchase some of our components required for our research and development. At the same time, we are also looking into possibility of funding from outside resources such as musical ornament, disco lighting produce company. As a contingency plan for covering costs that might not be covered through the accumulated funds, we have all decided to split the uncovered costs amongst each team members equally. 13
7. SCHEDULE The timeline and milestone for our project is shown in Figure 4 and Figure 5 respectively. The timeline specifies the due dates of various documents whereas the milestone is a close approximation to our working schedule. FIGURE 4 PROJECT TIMELINE FIGURE 5 PROJECT MILESTONE 14
8. COMPANY PROFILE 8.1 TEAM ORGANIZATION Mutrix Technology consists of five innovative and enthusiastic engineering students: Shuozhi Yang, Winfield zhao, Benson Lam, Gary Heng, Weiguang Mou. Each member of the team is a 5 th year engineering student. When forming the team, we ensured that each member would have a diversity of interest and expertise in different technical aspects as it will provide us an advantage in finding feasible solutions to different technical problems that may appear later in the project. For example, we have members interested in hardware design, firmware programming, wireless data transmission programming and mechanical design. A summary of skills and work experiences of each member is provided in the Team Profile section of this document. Due to the difficulty of the project and the tight deadlines, each member will be assigned a large amount of work load. Task assignment will be based on individual s strengths and weaknesses to achieve highest efficiency. We also ensured that each member is able to perform well under time pressure and to deliver excellent quality work. Benson Lam is the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the company who will assign task to each member and monitor the progress of the project to ensure that it is not behind schedule. Benson will also devote his time in finding funding by presenting the project to different companies. With his strong background in real-time embedded system programming and computer aided design (CAD), he will contribute most of the time in developing the firm software and designing the mechanical system of Dreambox. Winfield Zhao is the Chief Technical Officer (CTO) of the company who has a strong background in electronic system design, mechanical systems and electromechanical actuators. His technical expertise will lead the whole group in the technological scope. Shuozhi Yang is the Chief Programming Officer (CPO) of the company who will utilize his expertise in VHDL for digital system design and C/C++ for software programming. His strong programming background is one of the key components to the success of Dreambox. Gary Heng is the Chief Design Officer (CDO) who will apply his engineering knowledge in designing the overall DreamBox layout. Gary will be responsible for providing different design ideas for implementing DreamBox. 15
Weiguang Mou is the Chief Financial Officer (CFO) who will manage the budget and resolve financial issues towards the completion of the project. His expertise in programming and mechanical system design also makes him valuable to the development of the project. In order to monitor the progress of the overall project and individual tasks, weekly meeting will be held every Friday to discuss about different technical issue. The duration of each meeting will be 1 hour long and each member must provide a precise statement about the completion of his milestone of the week. The rest of the meeting will be discussing technical issues encountered by each member. In order to verify that our project is on the right aspect, some meetings will also be held with Patrick Leung, and Carlo Menon who are electronics engineering senior lecturer at SFU, and mechanical engineering professor at SFU, respectively. Mutrix Technology is confident that the project will be successfully built before the deadline and most importantly, all members pursue the same goal as to contribute the best we have. 8.2 MEMBER PROFILE Benson Lam (Chief Executive Officer) Benson Lam is a fifth year electronics Engineering student at Simon Fraser University. He has a great interest in topics such as advanced digital system design, integrated circuit design in the context of modern silicon integrated circuits technology and wireless data transfer protocols (Bluetooth, and Wi-Fi). Furthermore, he has a strong background in programming and he is proficient with VHDL, Verilog, C/C++ and Matlab scripting language. Benson has done one co-op work term at Nokia as an RF circuitry developer and two co-op work terms at KPMG LLP, which is one of the big four accounting companies worldwide, as an SR&ED reporter. With his practical work experience in hardware design and prior interaction with many other companies in the business world, Benson is a big asset to Mutrix Technology in both technical and business scopes. Winfield Zhao (Chief Technical Officer) Winfield Zhao is a fifth year electronic Engineering student at Simon Fraser University. He has a strong background in hardware design. He had worked in Sierra Wireless as a hardware designer for 8 months. He can apply his knowledge and skills for the circuit and PCB design of our project. Furthermore, He had worked on two different kinds of micro-controller (ATtiny45 and PIC18F4550) during last coop work team in Budapest University of Technology and Economic (BME). His 16
experience in hardware design and micro-controller programming makes him suitable for this position. Gary Heng (Chief Design Officer) Gary Heng is a fifth year engineering student in Simon Fraser University. He has experience programming in C, assembly language, Perl and Labview. Also, he will be providing valuable ideas to implement DreamBox due to his expertise in firmware development. His previous experience working in VTECH Communications and Redback Networks will significantly enhance our problem solving in digital and analog communication. Shuozhi Yang (Chief Programming Officer) Shuozhi Yang is an outstanding fifth year electronics Engineering student at Simon Fraser University. He has a great interest in computer aid design (CAD), digital system design and real-time embedded system programming. Shuozhi Yang has done three co-op terms at PMC Sierra where he worked as a firmware developer. Shuozhi Yang possesses the innovative thinking and competent programming skills that a professional programmer should have and that makes him the lead programmer in Mutrix Technology. Weiguang Mou (Chief Financial Officer) Weiguang is a fifth year undergraduate student of electronics engineering at the Simon Fraser University. He will work towards overseeing the funding, budgeting, and financing of our project. In addition, he has done three Co-op terms at Vtech, Nokia and Mobidia. He has experience with wireless communication, automation testing and various programming langrage such as C++, JAVA, VB and Assembly langrage. His hands on experience and excellent communication skill will be helpful assets for the company. 17
9. CONCLUSION Mutrix Technology is dedicated to developing an innovative gadget, DreamBox, which has the ability to react with music from an external source, such as an MP3 player, to form different 3D crystal shapes on a platform under the colorful lighting of LEDs. The LEDs will maximize the user s home audio entertainment system. Furthermore, DreamBox can also be served as a renewable decoration to continuously convey people s creativity in an environmentally-friendly way. The long term vision of Mutrix Technology is to build DreamBox in a big scale and use it as a decoration for parks, malls and lobbies in commercial building. In this document, we proposed to demonstrate DreamBox not only as an innovative but also a feasible idea. We also presented our strong expertise in different technical aspects which will make this project possible. Finally, our detailed timeline schedule demonstrates that our product will be completed within the specified time frame. 18
10. REFERENCE [1]. Meghan Henning, Jan 8, 2009, CONSUMER ELECTRONICS INDUSTRY ISSUES 2009 FORECAST <http://www.ce.org/press/currentnews/press_release_detail.asp?id=11666> [2]. LIGHT-MUSIC FOUNTAIN PROJECT FOR KAZANA CITY <http://prometheus.kai.ru/font3_e.htm> [3]. COLLECTIBLE MUSIC BOXES AND MUSICAL GIFTS <http://musicboxes.collectiblestoday.com/ct/store/mb?cm_ven=canada&cm_cat=s earch&cm_pla=google&cm_ite=keyword&external=y&displaymode=ca2> [4]. <http://www.tigerdirect.ca/applications/category/category_tlc.asp?catid=1623> [5]. <http://jdfrey.files.wordpress.com/2006/11/ipod.jpg> [6]. <http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/21/speaker_icon.svg /500px-Speaker_Icon.svg.png> [7]. <http://profy.com/wpcontent/blogs.dir/1/images/aleslie/a_funny_music_note_000.png> 19