Over the past couple months, in between traveling for the holidays and working through a few steps for our visa renewal process, I took on a small contract project to develop a new iOS app. The project was initiated as a Python porting project, taking about 400 lines of code from a prototype TKinter application, and turning it into native Swift for iOS. This happens to be a process that I’m well familiar with. The end product, which I’m proud to announce hear, is called ListenUp, and is a novel test to generate your audiogram, or hearing sensitivity in each year as a function of pitch. You can see a few screenshots below, or click the link to download and try yourself. Or, check out the official ListenUp page.
ListenUp
Five Minute Audiogram
How Does it Work?
The core of the app is a hearing test, consisting of a bunch of very quiet and slowly ramping sine tones. The idea is that they should start just below your threshold of hearing. When you are able to hear it, you tap the button for the ear that you heard it in, and then the app registers that as a single point in your personal hearing sensitivity dataset. There’s a bit more to it than that, if you want to learn more you can check out this quick video with my dude Belarriak.
What kind of name is Belarriak, you ask? Well, its Euskera for “Ears,” so more Basque easter eggs to go with my techie projects. The character design is one that I created in Blender, and I’ve even rigged it to animate the ears and movement around the screen, with a fun spacey background to boot.
One of the unique things about ListenUp is a novel regression algorithm for determining your fitted sensitivity curve. That was actually one of the only items of the port that we opted to keep in Python code, as it relied on a few libraries that didn’t have direct parallels in Swift. So, along with some of the iOS development skills that I got to flex on the project, I also picked up a bit of server-side programming using Flask.
All-in-all, ListenUp was an enjoyable project for me to take on as I transition into a software career, while also touching on some of my acoustics and vibration background. The audiogram is, of course, the audiology version of a Frequency Response Function (FRF) that we would always produce as part of a modal analysis. There’s also a bit of interesting data science involved as well with our back-end server. I hope you give it a try, and if you like it, please give a review on the App Store!
Other Recent Projects
Among other things, over the past couple of months I’ve been refining my 3D modeling abilities in Blender, particularly around animation. Of course I had to apply this to my favorite photogrammetry-based model of Puppy, which I used to learn about character rigging. As you can see, I taught Puppy to dance!
I also revamped an animation for the DCDC LLC branding logo. I wanted to use the animated form of the logo to highlight some of the specializations that I’ve picked up over the years. In brief, these new scenes include:
- DC Dynamics & Control – a graphic from my microphone patent, a diagram for a 3D trajectory simulation, and a contour plot from a modal analysis on a rocket fin.
- DC Design & Code – icons for five mobile apps that I have released to date, and devices rendered with YouKon and Mobile Multibody Dynamics screenshots.
- DC Data Analytics & Consulting – a FRF (remember what I said about the audiogram connection???).
- DCDC LLC – Puppy, of course, and the DC-Engineer.com URL.
The still images from the graphic above have made their way into header images for the mechanical and mobile pages of this site, as well as the animated gif being visible on the front page. I’ve made a few updates to the DC-Engineer.com site over the past couple of weeks, so be on the lookout for those changes!