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 …

Introduction To Mechanical Engineering, Lorik Abdullai, Joseph R. Dunn

Honors Theses

I can still remember back in high school when I was faced with a decision thousands of students experience every year: What college was I going to choose, and what major was I going to study? It seemed like every time I saw friends and relatives they asked me that question. Meanwhile, I knew that going to a major university would give me more choices in case I changed majors. As it turned out, Western Michigan University was the best package for me when I considered the financial aid, the program ofmy major, location of the university, and its friendly …

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 …

Creating A Video Device Application, Kevin Septor

Honors Theses

A video device, such as a webcam, has the capability to be used in many ways, including recording video and behaving like a security camera. A TV tuner card can also record video, and in addition be used for watching television. However, the video hardware and device driver the operating system uses to access it are only capable of delivering raw frames of video. A user space application is necessary for exploiting the capabilities of such a device beyond reading sequential frames of video. This research explores the desiderata in a powerful video device application, and introduces a program that …