Engineering Commons^™

Midi Recorder And Learning Tool, Caden Dees, Saikishore Gowrishankar, Cameron Johnson, Benjamin Bolyard

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

The project's goal is to create a device that can record MIDI files from any standard 88-key piano as well as teach piano learners how to play songs.

A Feasibility Study Of A Wearable Health Monitoring Device Powered By Thermoelectric Generators, Sarah Schneider

Masters Theses

Implementation of thermoelectric generators (TEGs) as a power source for embedded systems has increased with the push toward alternative and renewable energy sources. Thermoelectric generators produce electrical energy from thermal energy through the Seebeck effect. The Seebeck effect is a phenomenon seen when a temperature difference at a joint of two different metals generates a DC current and electromotive force [1]. This has made TEGs desirable for embedded system applications because it would allow for extended wireless operation. TEGs are based on solid-state technology which means they do not consist of any moving parts which reduces wear and tear with …

Phone Microwave, Khanh Kim Hoang, Emily Zhou

Computer Engineering

This project involves the installation of remote-control capabilities in an antique 1980s microwave, effectively turning the microwave into a “smart” device. While preserving the original functionality of the microwave, a combination of software and hardware components allows for remote microwave operations. The microwave can be remotely operated by calling the built-in number, and more advanced settings and options can be utilized by texting. The microwave is also secured against unauthorized use with the addition of a PIN code that is required to operate the device.

Unmanned Aircraft Systems For Precision Meteorology: An Analysis Of Gnss Position Measurement Error And Embedded Sensor Development, Karla S. Ladino

Theses and Dissertations--Biosystems and Agricultural Engineering

The overarching objective of this research was to enhance our comprehension of the three-dimensional precision of meteorological measurements obtained using small unmanned aircraft systems (UAS). Two complimentary experiments were conducted to achieve this objective.

The first experiment entailed the development and implementation of a system to determine the global navigation satellite system (GNSS) position accuracy on a UAS platform. This system was utilized to assess the static and dynamic accuracy of L1 and L1/L2 GNSS receivers in real-time kinematic (RTK) and non-RTK fix modes. Adjusted two-sample t-tests revealed significant differences in horizontal and vertical error between RTK and non-RTK receivers …

Developing A Miniature Smart Boat For Marine Research, Michael Isaac Eirinberg

Computer Engineering

This project examines the development of a smart boat which could serve as a possible marine research apparatus. The smart boat consists of a miniature vessel containing a low-cost microcontroller to live stream a camera feed, GPS telemetry, and compass data through its own WiFi access point. The smart boat also has the potential for autonomous navigation. My project captivated the interest of several members of California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo’s (Cal Poly SLO) Marine Science Department faculty, who proposed a variety of fascinating and valuable smart boat applications.

Analog & Digital Remote Synthesizer, Adam Brunner, Andrew Cihon-Scott, Scott Grisso, Linus Wright

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

The purpose of this project is to develop and design an analog synthesizer musical instrument that integrates embedded digital hardware into the design to enable control from a remote source. The use of digital hardware enables the potential for a wide range of convenient features such as sound profile saving and loading, output recording functionality, and the ability to accept digital input from another musical instrument utilizing the Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI). In addition to the synthesizer itself, this project also includes the design of a companion application that can be hosted on a wide variety of consumer computing …

E-Z Door: Hands-Free Front Door Unlocking And Opening Mechanism, Caleb Dyck

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

The E-Z Door Senior Design project is a project with the aim of designing a hands-free system to unlock and open the front door of a home using two-factor security authentication.

The main goal of this project is to help people who may have physical limitations to be able to take advantage of recent technology, making it significantly easier to enter their homes.

Dashboard, Bradley Manuel Levin, Kyle Matthew King

Computer Engineering

Modern gamers are always looking for new and exciting ways to play board games. Our senior project, DashBoard, is intended to capitalize on this interest and upgrade board games to have pre-programmed moves and easy piece moving. It is a proof-of-concept project for a programmable chess-style game board using an electromagnet array to move the pieces around the board. With an easily programmable interface with the Raspberry Pi 3, users can make their own programs or find ones others have made online to move pieces in creative ways.

Flight Director Embedded System And Mobile Ios Application, Anthony Epshteyn

Computer Engineering

For my senior project, I was asked to assist an Aerospace Engineering professor with the design of his new glider. He needed to create a flight director-type instrument so that his pilot could get the aircraft’s positional data during flight. This positional data came from a powerful sensor mounted on the fuselage. To interface with the sensor, I created an embedded system comprised of a ESP32 micro-controller communicating with the sensor via UART/RS-232. The micro-controller was mounted on a breadboard and connected to the sensor via jumper wires. The ESP32 featured a Bluetooth chip that allowed for communication using the …

Eye Pressure Monitior, Andrea Nella Levy

Computer Engineering

The document describes a mobile application that takes information from an attached device which tests eye pressure. The device consists of an IOIO board connected to a custom device that measures the frequency of a given waveform. The device was designed by another student for their senior project, which I am taking over. This device is connected to an IOIO board which is a board designed by a Google employee which works with an android phone in order to create applications that work with embedded systems. The board comes with an API and connects to the phone via a micro-USB. …

Musictrakr, Benjamin Lin

Computer Engineering

MusicTrackr is an IoT device that musicians attach to their instruments. The device has a start and stop button that allows users to record their playing sessions. Each recorded session is sent wirelessly to a cloud database. An accompanying website displays all of the recorded sessions, organized by date. After picking a specific date, the user can view graphs showing total practice time and average session length as well play back any recordings during that date. In addition, the user may add comments to any specific date or recording. Lastly, the user may tag a specific date with a color …

Exploiting Energy Harvesting For Passive Embedded Computing Systems, Jeremy Joel Gummeson

Doctoral Dissertations

The key limitation in mobile computing systems is energy - without a stable power supply, these systems cannot process, store, or communicate data. This problem is of particular interest since the storage density of battery technologies do not follow scaling trends similar to Moore's law. This means that depending on application performance requirements and lifetime objectives, a battery may dominate the overall system weight and form factor; this could result in an overall size that is either inconvenient or unacceptable for a particular application. As device features have scaled down in size, entire embedded systems have been implemented on a …

The Design, Analysis, & Application Of Multi-Modal Real-Time Embedded Systems, Masud Ahmed

Wayne State University Dissertations

For many hand-held computing devices (e.g., smartphones), multiple operational modes are preferred because of their flexibility. In addition to their designated purposes, some of these devices provide a platform for different types of services, which include rendering of high-quality multimedia. Upon such devices, temporal isolation among co-executing applications is very important to ensure that each application receives an acceptable level of quality-of-service. In order to provide strong guarantees on services, multimedia applications and real-time control systems maintain timing constraints in the form of deadlines for recurring tasks. A flexible real-time multi-modal system will ideally provide system designers the option to …

Wi-Fi Evapotranspiration Irrigation Controller, Ryan Goodman

Electrical Engineering

This report discusses the applications of an Irrigation Controller with Wi-Fi connectivity, with focus on cost-effectiveness and usability. It addresses the amount to which traditional irrigation is wasteful, and proposes solutions to solve this problem. Methods for using online weather data resources to increase efficiency of residential landscaping are discussed in depth. Included is the procedural development of an irrigation controller using the Microchip Explorer 16 Development Board and TCP/IP Stack. Also discussed is web hosting and use of the scripting language PHP, and database MySQL. This project found inexpensive means for providing HTTP and FTP services. Results indicate an …

Testing Program For Kysat‐1, Jason Robert Bratcher

University of Kentucky Master's Theses

Years of success in the aerospace industry has taught Kentucky Space several lessons. This thesis will summarize the accomplishments in an attempt to formulate a well-defined program for designing and testing small spacecraft in an environment with strict financial restraints. The motivation for producing this well-defined platform for testing small spacecraft arose when Kentucky Space became the liaison between NASA and its customers for the NanoRacks and CubeLab module program. Having a solid program for testing small spacecraft will allow future student programs to easily set standards for experiment payloads. Also by discussing obstacles for smaller programs such as restraints …

Development Of A Reusable Cubesat Satellite Bus Architecture For The Kysat-1 Spacecraft, Tyler James Doering

University of Kentucky Master's Theses

This thesis describes the design, implementation and testing of a spacecraft bus implemented on KySat-1, a picosatellite scheduled to launch late 2009 to early 2010. The spacecraft bus is designed to be a robust reusable bus architecture using commercially available off the shelf components and subsystems. The bus designed and implemented for the KySat-1 spacecraft will serve as the basis for a series of future Kentucky Space Consortium missions. The spacecraft bus consists of attitude determination and control subsystem, communications subsystem, command and data handling subsystem, thermal subsystem, power subsystem, and structures and mechanisms. The spacecraft bus design is described …