Engineering Commons^™

Reasoning From Point Clouds, Joey Wilson

Computer Engineering

Over the past two years, 3D object detection has been a major area of focus across industry and academia. This is primarily due to the difficulty of learning data from point clouds. While camera images are fixed size and can therefore be easily trained on using convolution, point clouds are unstructured series of points in three dimensions. Therefore, there is no fixed number of features, or a structure to run convolution on. Instead, researchers have developed many ways of attempting to learn from this data, however there is no clear consensus on what is the best method, as each has …

Reach - A Community Service Application, Samuel Noel Magana

Computer Engineering

Communities are familiar threads that unite people through several shared attributes and interests. These commonalities are the core elements that link and bond us together. Many of us are part of multiple communities, moving in and out of them depending on our needs. These common threads allow us to support and advocate for each other when facing a common threat or difficult situation. Healthy and vibrant communities are fundamental to the operation of our society. These interactions within our communities define the way we as individuals interact with each other, and society at large. Being part of a community helps …

Digital Forensics Challenge, Zoe Lie, Sydney Marie Mendoza

Computer Engineering

No abstract provided.

Vehicle Control Unit, Ayusman Saha

Computer Engineering

The Vehicle Control Unit (VCU) is the central computer for Cal Poly’s Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) formula electric race car. It is responsible for processing driver inputs, managing the electric motor, and providing a robust safety net in the case of system failure. Additional functionality of the system include a power limiting mechanism as well as a traction control system. All VCU logic had to abide by SAE International rules for the competition. This project focused solely on the firmware for the VCU.

Weight Controlled Electric Skateboard, Zachary Barram, Carson Bertozzi, Vishnu Dodballapur

Computer Engineering

Technology and the way that humans interact is becoming more vital and omnipresent with every passing day. However, human interface device designers suffer from the increasingly popular “designed for me or people like me” syndrome. This design philosophy inherently limits accessibility and usability of technology to those like the designer. This places severe limits of usability to those who are not fully able as well as leaves non-traditional human interface devices unexplored. This project set out to explore a previously uncharted human interface device, on an electric skateboard, and compare it send user experience with industry leading human interface devices.

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.

Don't Trip! A Quicker Way To Plan Your Trip, Jose Cruz Arinaga, Ryan Wong

Computer Engineering

Currently, Google Maps does not provide users with a way to find the optimal path for a user to travel given a list of points. Given a list of destinations you may want to visit, our web application will do all of the difficult planning for you and ultimately find the most optimal path for you to take to visit all of your destinations in a timely manner. The people who will benefit most from this application are tourists or people who travel often and want to explore an unfamiliar city. Even locals running their weekly errands could save time …

Bpm: Blz Package Manager, Kenneth Huang

Computer Engineering

bpm (BLZ Package Manager) is a package manager for the open-source programming language BLZ, built in Java. It allows users of the BLZ programming language to create and upload their own packages, as well as downloading necessary dependency packages for their packages. To do this, the program communicates with the “cardiovascular”, a web server designed for users to upload and download BLZ packages.

The program has three primary functions. The first one, “init”, initializes a package directory for use with the package manager. Part of this initialization is creating a “heartbeat” meta file, which holds information about the package’s name, …

Keylime, Joshua Michael Magera

Computer Engineering

New freshmen arrive at Cal Poly every year, experience Week of Welcome, and, if they haven’t been to Firestone Grill within the first week, they can consider themselves an anomaly. But how long until those freshmen find the amazing sandwiches and breakfast burritos served at Gus’s Grocery or hear about the free burger promo at Sylvester’s? The goal of this senior project was to create an app, KeyLime, that makes it easy for college students to find new eateries and fresh deals that are local, affordable, and tasty. KeyLime aims to target college students and create a space for restaurants …

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 …

An Fpga Implementation Of Digital Guitar Effects, Carson James Robles

Computer Engineering

One of the most versatile aspects of the electric guitar is its ability to change its sound completely and on-the-fly through the use of effects pedals. Conventional guitar pedals contain one effect and can be chained together. The goal of this project is to serve as a contained multi-effects station with five popular electric guitar effects packed into one product. On top of this, the effects each have two tunable parameters to allow users to dial in the exact tone they are looking for. All of the signal processing done in this project is conducted on an FPGA which also …

Labeling Paths With Convolutional Neural Networks, Sean Wallace, Kyle Wuerch

Computer Engineering

With the increasing development of autonomous vehicles, being able to detect driveable paths in arbitrary environments has become a prevalent problem in multiple industries. This project explores a technique which utilizes a discretized output map that is used to color an image based on the confidence that each block is a driveable path. This was done using a generalized convolutional neural network that was trained on a set of 3000 images taken from the perspective of a robot along with matching masks marking which portion of the image was a driveable path. The techniques used allowed for a labeling accuracy …

Raspberry Pi Enterprise Network Wifi Bridge, Dylan Halland, Riley Barrett

Computer Engineering

The goal of this project is to allow an IoT device, such as a Weemo Smart Plug, Amazon Echo, Gaming Console, or any other Wi-Fi enabled device to connect to a WPA_EAP Enterprise Network by using a Raspberry Pi Zero W as a packet forwarding device. Extra configuration steps are required for devices connecting to an enterprise network, and many devices are not compatible at all. By using a Wi-Fi Bridge, any device can easily obtain internet access by connecting to the Pi.

The system can be implemented on either one wireless card or two separate cards depending on the …

Tidalsim Senior Project Report, Kent Zhang, Colin Vandervoort

Computer Engineering

Throughout the course of this project, our team helped the Cal Poly Biological Sciences department refine an intertidal zone simulator. The aim of this device is to allow any marine biologist to easily simulate a vast range of tidal zones in order to test animal behaviors within these zones. Another goal of this project is to make each simulation tank independent from the others by using a single microcontroller to handle all inputs and outputs of the system as well as logging all relevant data. The current system is set up so that a separate microcontroller handles dissolved oxygen and …

Keylime, Matthew Orgill

Computer Engineering

This project creates an iOS mobile app geared specifically toward the students of California Polytechnic State University. The app aims to provide the ability for users to discover new restaurants to checkout in the central coast area. These restaurants can be filtered to the user’s choosing based on the price of food, rating the restaurant has received, distance away from the user, and type of food. In addition, featured deals that local restaurants currently offer can be found on the app. Each restaurant can be favorited by the user to allow for better filtering of discovering new restaurants and to …

Grammar-Based Procedurally Generated Village Creation Tool, Kevin Matthew Graves

Computer Engineering

This project is a 3D village generator tool for Unity. It consists of three components: a building, mountain, and river generator. All of these generators use grammar-based procedural generation in order to create a unique and logical village and landscape each time the program is run.

A Database For Indexable Carbide Inserts, Andrew Yoder

Computer Engineering

The indexable inserts project is a collaborative effort to aggregate into a single database as many indexable carbide inserts from as many manufacturers as possible. Inserts are generally labeled with a part number following a specific standard determined by shapes and measurements, however specifications for certain aspects of carbide inserts—such as which materials they can cut—can vary by manufacturer. There currently is not a way to search a comprehensive database containing tools from multiple manufacturers for a handful of inserts that would satisfy some necessary parameters, making finding the correct tool in a shop a much more time-consuming process than …

The Soul Annoyed Robot: A Senior Project Report, Dayton Andrew Muxlow, Christian Johansen

Computer Engineering

Our goal for this senior project was to create a competitive robot designed to com- pete in Roborodentia 2019. Our project started during the Winter 2019 quarter, and ended with the competition on May 18, 2019. During that time, we developed an accurate solenoid shooting mechanism, an elevated conveyor belt to carry poker chips, and a servo arm to scoop in stacks of poker chips. These hardware compo- nents were attached to a circular differential-drive wooden base designed to be easy to control. We also planned out our match strategy and implemented this strategy with software written in C/Wiring to …

Identifying Hourly Traffic Patterns With Python Deep Learning, Christopher L. Leavitt

Computer Engineering

This project was designed to explore and analyze the potential abilities and usefulness of applying machine learning models to data collected by parking sensors at a major metro shopping mall. By examining patterns in rates at which customer enter and exit parking garages on the campus of the Bellevue Collection shopping mall in Bellevue, Washington, a recurrent neural network will use data points from the previous hours will be trained to forecast future trends.

Planr.: Planar Learning Autonomous Navigation Robot, Gabrielle S. Santamorena, Daniel Kasman, Jesus Mercado, Ben Klave, Andrew Weisman, Anthony Fortner

Computer Engineering

PLANR is a self-contained robot capable of mapping a space and generating 2D floor plans of a building while identifying objects of interest. It runs Robot Operating System (ROS) and houses four main hardware components. An Arduino Mega board handles the navigation, while an NVIDIA Jetson TX2, holds most of the processing power and runs ROS. An Orbbec Astra Pro stereoscopic camera is used for recognition of doors, windows and outlets and the RPLiDAR A3 laser scanner is able to give depth for wall detection and dimension measurements. The robot is intended to operate autonomously and without constant human monitoring …