Stroboscope

Dependencies:

• Coffee ☕️
• Xcode 🛠

Background

I was starting my second year of university and really not enjoying computer science. I was struggling with math, annoyed with my professors for teaching us Java and C instead of something cool like Python or Javascript, jealous of other students who had taken computer science courses in high school and were way ahead of me, and frustrated by what appeared to be favoritism of certain students in my classes of ~100 students. I had no friends in my classes except for my girlfriend (at the time) who was also a computer science student. I had absolutely nothing in common with the other students in my classes. I stumbled upon a poster for a competition to create a mobile application, snapped a picture, and brought it to my best friend (or maybe she was with me and we found it together… I don’t remember). We attended the first meeting and decided to go through with the competition. This was the first time I could come up with my own idea and work on my own project with whatever tools I wanted. My partner and I were already major Apple fans and had iPhones and MacBook Pros with Xcode and everything ready to go.

We agreed on a strobe light application that could synchronize to your music, programmatically. There wasn’t anything on the App Store like it at the time. By the end of the competition, my partner and I were the only competitors with a working & finished product. We gave a demonstration by hooking up one of our phones to a bluetooth speaker, playing some music and demonstrating how Stroboscope actually synchronized to the music. We could even prove that there was a market potential for our product because there were no competing apps in the App Store.

Details

Stroboscope is an experimental iOS application that uses a fast Fourier transform (FFT) to analyze music and uses the LED flashlight on an iPhone as a strobe light. Strobe lights at professional EDM festivals that do this can be very expensive, so Stroboscope is intended to be a low budget proof of concept.

Stroboscope began development in the fall of 2013 and was completed in May 2014 as an entry into the WVU App Challenge. Developed by two West Virginia University Computer Science students, Ricky Deal and Kaitlyn Landmesser, using Objective C. This was our first iOS application and Stroboscope won first prize at the WVU App Challenge.

Currently, the app is not being worked on, but we want to completely rewrite it, when we have the time.