Engineering Commons^™

Telerobotic Controller, Michael Fewless, George Slater, Steve Waldron

Honors Theses

Atelerobotic system allows a user to interact with an environment indirectly. Our project successfully creates a telerobotic environment between the Phantom 1.5 controller and the UMI RTX robotic arm. Utilizing the haptic features of the Phantom controller, a more realistic interaction was created between the telerobotic system and the user by providing sensory feedback. As the user manipulates the hand-controlled Phantom device, signals are sent via a parallel port to the personal computer. A real-time WIN32 application, utilizing the GHOST SDK library, reads the position of the Phantom controller's coordinates and calculates the corresponding motor positions of the UMI RTXrobotic …

Electron Vacuum Tube Guitar Amplifier, Erik Widman

Honors Theses

This project consisted of designing and fabricating an electron vacuum tube guitar amplifier. Vacuum tubes have become obsolete in modern electronics due to their size, cost, and inefficiency. However, vacuum tubes are still commonly used in guitar amplifiers. Vacuums tube's nonlinear amplifying characteristics are ideal for distorting a signal. Hence vacuum tubes are used in distorting guitar amplifiers commonly used in rock music. While guitar amplifiers consist of many subsystems, the focus of this senior design report is the distorting preamplifier.

Imagine a guitar signal as a pure sine wave (although in reality the signal is a complicated series of …