Engineering Commons^™

Improved Portable Back Pain Relief Device With User Interface, Zachary Bobango, Samuel J. Dauterman, Benjamin Bowman

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

The objective of this project is to design and create a massage system that is user interactive, portable, safe, efficient, and comfortable. The system should allow for user feedback from an outside peripheral such as a phone to be able to modify the system. Some challenges facing the implementation of such a system include: ensuring the product can withstand substantial force without breaking or malfunctioning while simultaneously being light enough for a consumer to carry without difficulty, engineering the massage heads to be able to move in multiple different motion types, creating the software that can control the device, and …

Trojan Detection Expansion Of Structural Checking, Zachary Chapman

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

With the growth of the integrated circuit (IC) market, there has also been a rise in demand for third-party soft intellectual properties (IPs). However, the growing use of such Ips makes it easier for adversaries to hide malicious code, like hardware Trojans, into these designs. Unlike software Trojan detection, hardware Trojan detection is still an active research area. One proposed approach to this problem is the Structural Checking tool, which can detect hardware Trojans using two methodologies. The first method is a matching process, which takes an unknown design and attempts to determine if it might contain a Trojan by …

Design Of Hardware To Aid Smartphone-Based Oscilloscope App, Riddock Moran

Honors Theses

A smartphone-based oscilloscope improves on traditional lab oscilloscopes in accessibility and portability but faces several performance limitations compared to traditional oscilloscopes. Among these, an oscilloscope app that uses the phone’s audio to read voltage signals will have a sampling rate and voltage bottlenecked by the capabilities of the audio codec, which will rarely exceed a rate of 48 kHz and 1 volt, respectively. Additionally, smartphones lack the ability to read line-in audio, allowing only one channel input through the microphone. Direct connections to an audio source may not be possible due to requiring an audio jack connection, and different poles …

Structural Checking Tool Restructure And Matching Improvements, Derek Taylor

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

With the rising complexity and size of hardware designs, saving development time and cost by employing third-party intellectual property (IP) into various first-party designs has become a necessity. However, using third-party IPs introduces the risk of adding malicious behavior to the design, including hardware Trojans. Different from software Trojan detection, the detection of hardware Trojans in an efficient and cost-effective manner is an ongoing area of study and has significant complexities depending on the development stage where Trojan detection is leveraged. Therefore, this thesis research proposes improvements to various components of the soft IP analysis methodology utilized by the Structural …

An Fpga-Based Hardware Accelerator For The Digital Image Correlation Engine, Keaten Stokke

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The work presented in this thesis was aimed at the development of a hardware accelerator for the Digital Image Correlation engine (DICe) and compare two methods of data access, USB and Ethernet. The original DICe software package was created by Sandia National Laboratories and is written in C++. The software runs on any typical workstation PC and performs image correlation on available frame data produced by a camera. When DICe is introduced to a high volume of frames, the correlation time is on the order of days. The time to process and analyze data with DICe becomes a concern when …

Hardware Ip Classification Through Weighted Characteristics, Brendan Mcgeehan

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Today’s business model for hardware designs frequently incorporates third-party Intellectual Property (IP) due to the many benefits it can bring to a company. For instance, outsourcing certain components of an overall design can reduce time-to-market by allowing each party to specialize and perfect a specific part of the overall design. However, allowing third-party involvement also increases the possibility of malicious attacks, such as hardware Trojan insertion. Trojan insertion is a particularly dangerous security threat because testing the functionality of an IP can often leave the Trojan undetected. Therefore, this thesis work provides an improvement on a Trojan detection method known …

Hardware And Software (Ksu), Rebecca Rutherfoord, Dawn Tatum, Susan Vandeven, Richard Halstead-Nussloch, James Rutherfoord, Zhigang Li

Computer Science and Information Technology Grants Collections

This Grants Collection for Hardware and Software was created under a Round Eleven ALG Textbook Transformation Grant.

Affordable Learning Georgia Grants Collections are intended to provide faculty with the frameworks to quickly implement or revise the same materials as a Textbook Transformation Grants team, along with the aims and lessons learned from project teams during the implementation process.

Documents are in .pdf format, with a separate .docx (Word) version available for download. Each collection contains the following materials:

• Linked Syllabus
• Initial Proposal
• Final Report

Solid State Drive, Shaun A. Steele

Electrical Engineering

This project documents the design and implementation of a solid state drive (SSD). SSDs are a non-volatile memory storage device that competes with hard disk drives. SSDs rely on flash memory, a type of non-volatile memory that is electrically erased and programmed. The appeal of SSDs lies in the fact that they allow a fast, reliable, and durable memory storage device. The goal of this project is to have a working external SSD built from scratch.

The Replacement Of Network Switches, Sean Fenton

Undergraduate University Honors Capstones

Networking equipment often has to be replaced every few years in order to keep up with network speed demands and bandwidth, as well as the expiration of equipment. Gallaudet’s network switches were approaching their End of Life (EoL) and the Gallaudet networking team decided to replace the networking equipment to improve the network efficiency at Gallaudet. After much research and debate, the decision was made to replace current Cisco networking equipment with Juniper in order to optimize the network speed for Internet traffic. Cisco and Juniper are competing brands for a wide range of networking equipment. The capstone project is …

Hardware Design Theory (Using Raspberry Pi), Anthony Kelly, Thomas Blum Dr.

Undergraduate Research

The concept for this research proposal is focused on achieving three main objectives:

1) To understand the logic and design behind the Raspberry Pi (RbP) mini-computer model, including: all hardware components and their functions, the capabilities [and limits] of the RbP, and the circuit engineering for these components.

2) To be able to, using the Python high-level language, duplicate, manipulate, and create RbP projects ranging from basic user-input and response systems to the theories behind more intricate and complicated observatory sensors.

3) Simultaneously, in order to combine a mutual shared interest of History and to blend in work done within …

Spirit: A Home Automation System, Andrew Choi

Computer Engineering

Spirit is a multi device home automation system. Designed and implemented for California Polytechnic State University’s Senior Project program, this project was worked on during the duration of two school quarters from January 7, 2014 to June 13, 2014. The system consists of monitor/controllers designed to carry out everyday tasks in the average American household and an accompanying mobile application designed to receive information and control the devices. The monitor/controllers, or “Spirits”, are primarily developed using Arduino development tools and Arduino microcontroller boards. The spirits include a thermostat, named Tempus, an electrical outlet, Electrus, and a wall light switch, Luxos.

Design Of An Open-Source Sata Core For Virtex-4 Fpgas, Cory Gorman

Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014

Many hard drives manufactured today use the Serial ATA (SATA) protocol to communicate with the host machine, typically a PC. SATA is a much faster and much more robust protocol than its predecessor, ATA (also referred to as Parallel ATA or IDE). Many hardware designs, including those using Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs), have a need for a long-term storage solution, and a hard drive would be ideal. One such design is the high-speed Data Acquisition System (DAS) created for the NASA Surface Water and Ocean Topography mission. This system utilizes a Xilinx Virtex-4 FPGA. Although the DAS includes a SATA …