Engineering Commons^™

Jamming Attack Workaround Study, Soren Madsen, Jack Schoen

Interdisciplinary Design Senior Theses

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a fast growing industry with strong footholds in the smart home market featuring devices such as the Amazon Echo, Ring security cameras, smart TVs, and much more. However, it doesn’t stop there; the industrial sector has begun using smart devices for measurement, automated tasks, and time sensitive communication. Many of these devices have become reliant on WiFi technology and are vulnerable to attacks on the security of the protocols involved.

In this paper, we discuss the details of the deauthentication attack on WPA and WPA2 systems and propose a solution for detection and recovery …

Radio Frequency Direction Finding System, Jacob Taub, Austin Colon

Electrical and Computer Engineering Senior Theses

In certain terrain types It is difficult to locate people, objects, animals, etc. In particular, using one’s eyes and ears to locate something has certain disadvantages. Visible light propagates at high frequencies and is easily stopped by terrain. Also, sound waves do not propagate as effectively as electromagnetic waves in open air because they are mechanical waves. Therefore, our goal is to create a system that can locate emitters that output electromagnetic waves in the radio frequency (RF) portion of the electromagnetic spectrum (EMS). RF operates at a lower frequency than visible light and will diffract around mountains and pass …

Probability Based Logic Locking On Integrated Circuits, Michael Yue

Electrical and Computer Engineering Master's Theses

The demand of integrated circuits (IC)s are increasing and the industry has outsourced the fabrication process to untrusted environments. An adversary at these untrusted facilities can reverse engineer parts of the IC to reveal the original design. IC piracy and overproduction are serious issues that threaten the security and integrity of a system. These ICs can be copied illegally and altered to contain malicious hardware. The pirated ICs can be placed in consumer products which may harm the system or leak sensitive information. Hardware obfuscation is a technique used to protect the original design before it gets fabricated, tested, assembled, …

Mobile Nanogrid, Daniel Mendoza, Ben Mahony, Charles Ju, Michael Batshon

Interdisciplinary Design Senior Theses

The mobile nanogrid is a standalone mobile power solution which uses a combination of automatic and manual tracking mechanisms to maintain a solar panel's perpendicularity to the sun over the course of the day in order to maximize energy generation. The power can then be consumed by a user or stored. It is designed to be placed on the roof of a vehicle for the recreational camping market to meet the need for mobile power generation. A scaled-down functional prototype was designed in SolidWorks, modeled in MATLAB Simulink, fabricated in the machine shop using a combination of off-the-shelf and custom …

Automated Mixed-Dose Pill Dispenser With Image Verificaton, Nairu Garcia-Acevedo, Rohan Bhatt

Electrical and Computer Engineering Senior Theses

With the unfathomable number of medications that are available today due to medicinal advancements, there is room for error in the distribution of such medication even within proper pharmaceutical settings. Our primary goal is to reduce the overall contribution of a wide range of human errors in the dispersion of medication which is found to be an extremely large industry in today's age while doing so in a cost effective manner. This is to be executed first using a robotic arm, to automate and create mobility, and second, including image verification, to classify and select pills based on certain characteristics. …

Attacking Logic Locked Circuits Using Reinforcement Learning, Allen Shelton, Jake Mellor

Electrical and Computer Engineering Senior Theses

Logic Locking is an emerging form of hardware obfuscation that is intended to be a solution to many of the trust issues associated with the modern globalized IC supply chain. By inserting extra key-gates into a circuit, the functionality of the circuit can be locked until the correct order of bits or “key” is applied to the key gates. To assess the strength of new logic locking techniques, we propose a new attack that uses deep reinforcement learning. This attack aims to test logic locking as well as evaluate reinforcement learning as a possible attack against logic locking. By using …

Machine Learning-Based Side-Channel Analysis On The Advanced Encryption Standard, Jack Edmonds, Tyler Moon

Electrical and Computer Engineering Senior Theses

Hardware security is essential in keeping sensitive information private. Because of this, it’s imperative that we evaluate the ability of cryptosystems to withstand cutting edge attacks. Doing so encourages the development of countermeasures and new methods of data protection as needed. In this thesis, we present our findings of an evaluation of the Advanced Encryption Standard, particularly unmasked and masked AES-128, implemented in software on an STM32F415 microcontroller unit (MCU), against machine learning-based side-channel analysis (MLSCA). 12 machine learning classifiers were used in combination with a side-channel leakage model in the context of four scenarios: profiling one device and key …

Powering Iot Sensors With Rf Energy Harvesting, Austin Rothschild, Kristi Nguyen

Electrical and Computer Engineering Senior Theses

There is a need to power Internet of Things (IoT) applications that require frequent, expensive, and/or dangerous battery replacements. Radio-frequency energy harvesting (RFEH) is a possible alternative source of power for select IoT sensor applications. In comparison to other methods of energy harvesting, RFEH has the smallest incident power densities and therefore comes with many design challenges.

In this project we implement a novel RFEH system powered via a dedicated transmitter. A planar inverted-F antenna (PIFA) and voltage doubler circuit form the designed rectenna (rectifier + antenna) and the system is implemented on a custom PCB to carry out RF-to-DC …

Adaptive Deposition Of Difficult Materials, Abel Daniel, Emily Holden, Gabriela Sanches Carvalhocarval Silva

Electrical and Computer Engineering Senior Theses

When using a robotic arm, the path that the arm follows is typically unique to the task it completes, but not to the object upon which the task is performed. Additionally, when extruding materials, those materials are typically easy to work with (i.e. smooth and uniform). In this paper, we discuss our three-pronged approach, focusing on the imaging of the cupcake, the robotic arm’s movement about the cupcake, and the extrusion method, to achieve this goal of, simply-speaking, decorating a cupcake. While our results were not optimized or as broad as we’d initially hoped that they would be, we were …

Telehealth Sensor Authentication Through Memory Chip Variability, Calvin Kimbro, Holden Gordon, Thomas Lyp

Electrical and Computer Engineering Senior Theses

In light of the COVID-19 world-wide pandemic, the need for secure and readily available remote patient monitoring has never been more important. Rural and low income communities in particular have been severely impacted by the lack of accessibility to in-person healthcare. This has created the need for access to remote patient monitoring and virtual health visits in order for greater accessibility to premier care. In this paper, we propose hardware security primitives as a viable solution to meet the security challenges of the telehealth market. We have created a novel solution, called the High-Low (HiLo) method, that generates physical unclonable …

An Input Power-Aware Maximum Efficiency Tracking Technique For Energy Harvesting In Iot Applications, Sanad Fares Yousef Kawar

Engineering Ph.D. Theses

The Internet of Things (IoT) enables intelligent monitoring and management in many applications such as industrial and biomedical systems as well as environmental and infrastructure monitoring. As a result, IoT requires billions of wireless sensor network (WSN) nodes equipped with a microcontroller and transceiver. As many of these WSN nodes are off-grid and small-sized, their limited-capacity batteries need periodic replacement. To mitigate the high costs and challenges of these battery replacements, energy harvesting from ambient sources is vital to achieve energy-autonomous operation. Energy harvesting for WSNs is challenging because the available energy varies significantly with ambient conditions and in many …

Adaptive Navigation Utilizing A Drone Cluster, Zach Cameron, Brendan Engh, Thomas Kambe, Aditya Krishnan

Interdisciplinary Design Senior Theses

The current infrastructure for drone piloting involves drones flying in a predetermined path to find an object, source, or target with a known location. Drones should be able to determine an optimal flight path mid-flight in order to find an undefined source or target given existing parameters that can be analyzed from incoming sensor data. However, a framework for such a feat is almost non-existent. Our project aims to build such a framework that allows for the control of and communication among multiple drones, called a cluster, and allows for in-flight analysis and processing of sensor information to determine how …

Delay-Based Physical Unclonable Function Implementation, Abigail Aguirre, Michael Hall, Timothy Lim, Jonathan Trinh

Electrical and Computer Engineering Senior Theses

As we venture further into the 21st century, it becomes much clearer that hardware security is at the forefront of many challenges that we face today in ensuring that data is protected. “Keys” (a sequence of bits) can be used to unlock pieces of data and is a concept that is pervasive throughout cryptography, but storage in memory makes this sole method nonviable. To make the approach more practical, one can dynamically generate a key through a Physical Unclonable Function (PUF). PUFs are circuit primitives that use intrinsic variations of microchips created during the manufacturing process to generate a unique …

Heavy Lift Drone, Sam Carhart, David Cooper, Luis Gaitan, Michael Kaliterna, Sami Lama, Paul Rogel-Herrera, Yuya Yabe

Interdisciplinary Design Senior Theses

Despite the rapid rise in the number of drones in the past few years, there has been little work done to produce a drone that is optimized for the FAA' s 55 lb upper takeoff limit. This gap in the market is one that the Heavy Lift Drone (HLD) fills - a light-weight, higher payload capability, and inexpensive drone to be used in commercial applications - most notably irrigation monitoring. The HLD is a contra-rotating hexagonal configuration system featuring two levels of propellers that allow for larger propeller diameter and generate greater lift. After performing extensive finite element analyses and …

Disaster Relief Communications Box, Kyle Johnson, Karter Naito

Electrical and Computer Engineering Senior Theses

This report showcased a project from Santa Clara University's Senior Design Showcase. Current senior electrical engineering students Karter Naito and Kyle Johnson have created a Natural Disaster Relief Communications Box that they hope will have a big impact on natural disasters. The device had three different power sources to provide power to operate the device : plug-in wall charger , solar panel, and a handle crank. Powered by a Raspberry Pi 4, it could set up a local Wi-Fi network for people to connect to and receive and send important information. To increase the reliability of the device , it …

3dscanner, Thomas Heckman, Robert Kalb, Shreyes Nallan

Electrical and Computer Engineering Senior Theses

This project entails designing, prototyping, and testing a 3D scanner. The device that we are building uses LIDAR to take position data of a 3D object, then analyze and encode the sensor data as an STL file that can later be 3D printed out at the same resolution. We aim to build an affordable, high-performance 3D scanner that takes advantage of the falling cost of LIDAR in order to bring 3D scanning capabilities to individuals, the maker community, and even small businesses.

We begin this process by choosing a sensor, the YDLIDAR X4, as our primary method of taking position …

Solar Panel Monitor And Data Logger, Ryan Murray, Sharan Singh

Electrical and Computer Engineering Senior Theses

When deploying systems halfway across the world, having some system for monitoring their performance and status is essential. All We Are, in their mission to build solar panel installations in Uganda, encounters this problem daily. For our project, we worked with All We Are to deliver a system to monitor these solar installations. Building an embedded solution that can communicate with the solar installations and upload the data to the cloud allowed us to accomplish this goal. Our system connects data from the existing solar panel infrastructure to the cloud. The platform of our system is a Raspberry Pi microprocessor. …

Transmission System For Wireless Charging In Three-Dimensional Space, Bradley Shirley, Amritpal Singh

Electrical and Computer Engineering Senior Theses

Current methods of wireless power transfer (WPT) limit the mobility and usage of a device when it is actively charging. Here, a three-dimensional wireless power transfer technique known as quasistatic cavity resonance (QSCR) is studied in arbitrary geometries and practical scenarios. Physical fabrications and simulations demonstrate the viability of QSCR along with techniques for lowering the resonant frequency to meet safety standards. Two methods of lowering the resonant frequencies are presented, one by changing the physical dimensions and the other by increasing the systems capacitance. It is shown that QSCR is a feasible option to wirelessly transfer power in a …

Developing A Skin Phantom For The Testing Of Biowearables, Tawni Henderson, Ju Young Lee, Matthew Placide, Kiran Sutaria

Interdisciplinary Design Senior Theses

There is a demonstrated need in the biowearables industry for a benchtop model that can accurately emulate the perspiration mechanism and corresponding impedance vs. frequency spectra of skin. This model, or skin phantom, could increase the efficiency and accuracy of early-stage testing of biowearables, as well as minimize animal, human, and cadaver testing.

The objective of this project is to develop a skin phantom that can emulate the perspiration mechanism and impedance spectrum behavior of human skin for the testing of biowearables in the 2,000 - 20,000 Hz range. We also endeavored to create computer-simulated models to aid in the …

A Drift-Resilient And Degeneracy-Aware Loop Closure Detection Method For Localization And Mapping In Perceptually-Degraded Environments, Kamak Ebadi

Engineering Ph.D. Theses

Enabling fully autonomous robots capable of navigating and exploring unknown and complex environments has been at the core of robotics research for several decades. Mobile robots rely on a model of the environment for functions like manipulation, collision avoidance and path planning. In GPS-denied and unknown environments where a prior map of the environment is not available, robots need to rely on the onboard sensing to obtain locally accurate maps to operate in their local environment. A global map of an unknown environment can be constructed from fusion of local maps of temporally or spatially distributed mobile robots in the …

Metamaterial Absorbers For Mitigating Unintentional Radiated Emissions, Ali Khoshniat

Engineering Ph.D. Theses

Unintentional radiated emission spikes are one of the causes of failure in electromagnetic compliance tests of high-speed systems. In this thesis, a new absorber solution for mitigating such emissions is proposed using the concept of metamaterial structures. The absorber is placed inside the high-speed system shield box to match the low (almost zero) impedance of the metal walls to the wave impedance of unwanted radiations. As a result, waves reflected from the shield box are attenuated which eventually reduces the emissions leaked outside of the box. The effectiveness of the proposed solution is demonstrated through simulations and experimental evaluations of …

Deaddropbox: A Time-Locked Safe For Data, Robert Herriott, Peter Paulson, Nathaniel Kragas

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

This project is a proof-of-concept for software which would allow users to securely store sensitive data in such a way that it is difficult or impossible for third parties to compromise the data, even when the user is compelled to assist them. It will operate by storing data across multiple devices in a unreadable form so that it is inaccessible until the data is reunified. The user may specify the circumstances under which different pieces of the data may be accessed, so that it is impossible to access under circumstances of duress.

Myhouse, Johann Espinosa, Coby Jacobson, Mike Lau, Daniel Torre

Electrical and Computer Engineering Senior Theses

Consumers tend to lack an understanding of the way that their electricity is priced and the way that their energy consumption impacts utility operations. In this paper, we create a program and hardware implementation that uses day-before hourly electricity pricing and efficiency modes aiming to better distribute the user’s power consumption, control the user’s peak power consumption, shave peaks at the hours where electricity costs the most, as well as reduce the user’s monthly electricity bill. Our program achieves this by optimizing the operation time of appliances such as the washer, dryer, dishwasher, HVAC, and electric vehicle charging and by …

Wasp - Wireless Analog Sensor Platform, Tyler Hack, Cole Hunter, Daniel Webber

Electrical and Computer Engineering Senior Theses

WASP’s goal is to augment and eventually replace the bulky, costly, and complex data acquisition systems used for vibrational reliability tests on satellites. As a mechanism to guarantee that a spacecraft is mechanically durable and strong enough to withstand the acceleration forces experienced on the vessel during launch, companies conduct vibrational experiments on their spacecrafts by subjecting them to high G-force events. Using wired accelerometers connected to obstructive cables, the mounting process and test setups required to perform such experiments are expensive, laborious, and have the potential to generate measurement inaccuracies. We developed a low-cost, battery-powered module, designed for engineers, …

Epic: Examining Patch Impedance Characteristics, Shane Buck, Jyotsna Gopinath, Kyle Markfield

Interdisciplinary Design Senior Theses

In the United States, approximately one in 4 adults have at least one chronic illness, making up approximately 84% of US Healthcare Spending. Unfortunately, 50% of patients with chronic diseases do not take their medication properly and as such spend more money trying to get better – approximately $100 billion in annual preventable costs. One solution to this issue is digital medicine as it allows for the monitoring of patient medicine consumption.

Our industry partner has developed a three-part digital medicine system with the aim of allowing patients with chronic health issues to better reach their health goals through monitoring …

Sensor System For Rescue Robots, Alexander Moran, Emir Kusculu

Electrical and Computer Engineering Senior Theses

A majority of rescue worker fatalities are a result of on-scene responses. Existing technologies help assist the first responders in scenarios of no light, and there even exist robots that can navigate radioactive areas. However, none are able to be both quickly deployable and enter hard to reach or unsafe areas in an emergency event such as an earthquake or storm that damages a structure. In this project we created a sensor platform system to augment existing robotic solutions so that rescue workers can search for people in danger while avoiding preventable injury or death and saving time and resources. …

Design Of An Urban Garden Aquaponics System, Riley Albright-Borden, James Wang, Sydney Thompson

Interdisciplinary Design Senior Theses

The project objective is to create a durable, off-the-grid, large-scale aquaponics system consisting of over 90 sq. ft of growing space, a 650-gallon fishpond, and four types of sensors to transmit water quality data to the internet for remote water quality monitoring. The end goal of the project is to supplement produce grown in the garden to further increase fresh, nutritional options available in meals cooked and distributed by Loaves and Fishes Family Kitchen to combat food insecurity in San Jose. This report presents the need for a system, details the various subsystems, and the rationale for the designs. It …

Lactic Acid Threshold Stimulator, Justin Brackett, Karen Carreon, Fernando Guerra, Malyna Sanchez

Interdisciplinary Design Senior Theses

As a person works out, the threshold of lactic acid will build causing anywhere from discomfort to pain. Reducing the discomfort caused by lactic acid could greatly improve an individual’s performance while working out. Reducing this discomfort may be done through Electrical Muscle Stimulation (EMS), which is the procedure of contracting muscles through sending electrical signals. Our team’s goal is to create LATS, a wearable and mobile application that alleviates discomfort and aids muscle recovery during the intense parts of a workout. The system consists of a heart rate monitor to measure lactic acid levels, a garment that is worn …

Switched Capacitor Voltage Converter, Anne Hsia, Bradford Kidd

Electrical and Computer Engineering Senior Theses

This project supports IoT development by reducing the power con- sumption and physical footprint of voltage converters. Our switched- capacitor IC design steps down an input of 1:0 - 1:4 V to 0:6 V for a decade of load current from 5 - 50𝝁A.

Bronco Books: Textbook E-Commerce Platform, Vineet Joshi, Terry Shih, David Taylor

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

College students purchase textbooks for the classes they take every quarter, but current solutions for selling back those textbooks are insufficient, requiring that the student pay to utilize the selling platforms or that the student build rapport within a given community. Our project, Bronco Books, offers a solution by being a native mobile application open to only SCU students. Bronco Books will be free to access and will act as an e-commerce platform where students go to sell their textbooks. We were motivated to create Bronco Books primarily because we wanted to help alleviate the financial burden that comes with …