Computer Engineering Commons^™

Vr Force Feedback Gloves, Mark Wu, Claire Chen

Electrical Engineering

The goal of this project is to produce a manufacturing plan for a consumer VR glove. The total addressable market of VR is over 170 million global users as of 2022 (Kolmar , 2022) with a serviceable available market of 300,000 users on Meta’s own social platform (Heath, 2022). The targeted Quest 2 platform utilizes handheld controllers, which causes a lack of immersivity in social settings and gaming scenarios. One common use of the platform involves social platforms such as “Horizons” where users meet in a virtual world to interact; handheld controllers don’t allow users to shake hands, make finger …

Smartphone Control Of Rc Cars, Weston R. Fitzgerald

Electrical Engineering

The smartphone-controlled RC (remote-controlled) car is an inexpensive remote-controlled car designed to be fast and portable. Instead of manufacturing, packaging, and shipping a separate controller, the remote control is implemented in a phone application, which saves time and money in both the design process and the manufacturing process. Utilizing the user’s smartphone is more cost-effective since mobile devices are a common recurrence, and packaging fewer devices results in overall better portability of the product.

This smartphone-controlled car is speedy and intuitive to learn for typical smartphone users. The user can change the car’s speed and direction wirelessly using their phone; …

Lawn Buddy, Jayson Johnston, Andrew Brown, Jacob Maljian

Electrical Engineering

Grass lawns are a common hallmark of the American home. In 2019, a survey from the National Association of Landscape Professionals found that 81% of all Americans owned a lawn [1]. Mowing is a time consuming and costly chore that is part of maintaining a grass lawn. The manual labor in mowing a lawn can exceed 40 hours per year [2]. People commonly incur weekly costs on mowing services to save time. Traditional gas powered mowers are physically demanding and use engines that need routine maintenance. They operate loudly enough that users should be wearing hearing protection and the noise …

Polyone Smartphone, Joshua Zalmanowitz, Chi Nguyen, Gerome Cacho, Chris Lim

Electrical Engineering

The Poly One Smartphone is a student designed smartphone built to explore the implementation of 5G, provide a hardware solution to ensure personal information security and privacy, and provide longer battery life. The key features of this smartphone include but are not limited to a main cpu, some form of network connectivity in the form of Wi-fi or Cellular Data, calling functionality, a rechargeable battery that works with common power connection protocols, and compatibility with popular applications.

High Speed, High Current Monitoring System, Nicolette Lila Ray

Electrical Engineering

Electronics testing requires lengthy data collection and analysis. Streamlining at least part of this process allows resource reallocation, and faster data processing. Verifying a signal’s efficiency is key specification for a component’s datasheet. This project focuses on streamlining data collection when measuring a device’s output current. It combines amplifier design and digital interfacing to perform monitor a device’s output current. A computer-enable interface displays a graphical output current representation. It ensures accurate, high speed, high current measurements while removing a person’s need to manually plot data after testing. A new testing method provides room for company and product growth with …

The Characterization Of Effective Electromagnetic Fields On The Safety And Quality Of Low-Moisture Foods (Effs) - Prototype Device Development, Joe G. Sandoval

Electrical Engineering

Contamination of low-moisture foods including flour, wheat grain, baby formula, and more, have increasingly become a concern due to sanitizing challenges. While industrial food processors have long used RF heating to sanitize mass quantities, an equivalent consumer device is absent from the market today. The Characterization of Effective Electromagnetic Fields on the Safety and Quality of Low-Moisture Foods (EEFS) project is an interdisciplinary effort to develop an RF heating consumer device to sanitize low-moisture foods.

A prototype device was designed to sanitize low-moisture food items using RF heating acceptable for commercial or consumer applications.

Collision Avoidance Smartphone, Matt Columbres, Aaron Parisi, Joey Schnecker, Luis Wong

Electrical Engineering

There are many instances in day-to-day life where people cannot or would rather not pay full attention to their surroundings. Walking while preoccupied with a smartphone or walking while blind are excellent examples where technology could be used to make the task of avoiding 2collisions reactive, instead of proactive. A device which monitors a user’s surroundings and notifies the user when a potential collision is detected (and, additionally, notifying them as to where the obstacle is with respect to them) could be used to make walking distracted less of a hazard for the user and those around the user and …

Wireless Window Blinds, Cooper Laone, Niraj Morar, Zachary Malig, Jake Phillips

Electrical Engineering

The Internet of Things asserts that there exists a global need for all objects to connect easily and accessibly. Today, smartphones, tablets, laptops and smart watches makeup just a few of the interconnected devices by the greater population. As a result a growing need for wireless connection between personal devices like phones, and computers to everyday appliances exists. This idea extends directly to households, businesses and buildings, where a growing need for smart home or smart-business appliances has taken root. Many companies like Nest, ADT and Apple make products for automated home security and in home media control. The Wireless …

General-Purpose Digital Filter Platform, Michael Cheng

Electrical Engineering

This senior project provides a platform for high-speed, general-purpose digital filter implementation. EE 459 currently implements digital filters using reprogrammable digital signal processor boards. These aging digital signal processors serially calculate each difference equation term. Operating at 1 Mega-sample per second, the new general-purpose platform simultaneously processes at least ten digital filtering difference equation coefficients. The platform also features an audio jack input and BNC connectors for viewing input and output signals. The filter digitizes single channel audio signals at 44.1 kHz sampling rate with 16-bit precision or 1 MHz sampling at 8-bit precision. The new reprogrammable platform includes a …

Remote Cable Gantry, Allen L. Bailey

Electrical Engineering

The Remote Cable Gantry is a robotic system that was initially intended to aid in the art of aerial videography. It was designed to enable novice and expert users alike to capture both video footage and audio from perspectives unachievable by current methods. This system uses a series of cables to control the position of a camera gimbal in a defined 3D space and, as a self-contained unit, is portable and easy to use. The Remote Cable Gantry offers a quiet, intuitive, and safe alternative to existing technology, which has been limiting the market and potential of aerial photography and …

Light Sensing Automated Blinds, Andrew B. Hodges, Ryan C. Flick

Electrical Engineering

This project is solving the problem of wasted energy within buildings and homes, because currently the lights turned on inside building do not utilize natural, ambient light from the sun. Rather than having unnecessary light from a light source, the automated light sensing smart blinds can sense the amount of light outside the window and in the room, and then adjust the angle of the blinds to save energy by utilizing the available outdoor light. This way, the light source will not be running at maximum power output while there is excess light coming through the window. This project aims …

A Stroke Therapy Brace Design, Evan Kirkbride

Electrical Engineering

Victims of stroke often have difficulty with rehabilitation. With limited movement on their affected arm, patients often do not want to move much for physical therapy. In this project, we design a robotic brace that helps stroke patients move their arm more effectively in a reaching or pulling motion. By giving patients more movement in their affected arm than they would have otherwise, patients gain more from rehabilitation. The brace also adapts to the patient’s needs, providing more inclination or resistance as needed for their physical therapy. This kind of therapy engages patients rather than relying on their likely dwindled …

Cal Poly Supermileage Electronic Fuel Injection, Alexander Pink

Electrical Engineering

Cal Poly Supermileage is a student-run engineering club that builds prototype gasoline vehicles optimized maximum fuel-efficiency. To power their vehicles, the Supermileage team makes use of single-cylinder, 4-stroke, electronically fuel-injected (EFI) gasoline engines. This report details the development, iterative design & test cycles, and integration of an EFI system for the Supermileage club. This project develops an EFI system that interfaces to the most common types of sensors found in the low-power Supermileage-range of engines, including throttle-position sensors, manifold absolute pressure sensors, gear-tooth hall-effect sensors, variable-reluctance position sensors, engine coolant temperature sensors, intake air temperature sensors, and exhaust oxygen sensors. …

Wireless Sensor Mesh Network For Irrigation Systems, Rosana Cheruvelil, Oswaldo Garcia, Nabil Haque, Justin Ignacio, Stanley Thomas

Electrical Engineering

Pepper Oak Farms, a company that grows their own olives for olive oil and has approximately 40,000 olive trees, is in need of an efficient way to monitor the soil and atmospheric conditions that are critical to the cultivation of their trees. The company at the moment only has two sensors and has to manually place the sensors at different locations to collect data on soil moisture and temperature. This is expensive, time consuming, and a lot of effort on the owner’s part to go out on the fields to collect this data. As a solution, the company would like …

Innovative Connectivity Ensuring Education (I.-C.E.E.), Luke Cole, Andrew Ma, Nicholas Ross, Daniel Williams

Electrical Engineering

This is the critical design review for the Telepresence/Telerobotic Technology for Children with Disabilities Project by team I.- C.E.E. (Innovative Connectivity Ensuring Education). This report details our telepresence system design for our client (Nathan Stilts) including design choices/justification, testing verification and procedures, and chosen components for implementation. There are seven chapters in total starting with introductory/background information followed by hardware and software design, verification, and testing and concludes with the current status of the project and what future work may need to be included.

Battery Management System, Michael Desando, Kyle Woody

Electrical Engineering

Problem Statement:

There have been recent reports of multi-million dollar companies having to recall entire projects due to their BMS’s malfunctioning or operating incorrectly. The purpose of this project is to analyze the future of batteries, the Lithium-Ion cell, and to exercise a BMS to better understand its capabilities and possible cases for errors. Lithium ion batteries are intolerant of overcharge and overdischarge. Abuse of this kind can result in high temperatures, venting of gases, fire, or explosion. Therefore battery management systems have been devised to prevent such abuse. Recent events such as fires on the Boeing Dreamliner and the …

All Purpose Mobile Gps, James C. Smith, Matt Weege, Kevin Peters

Electrical Engineering

The aim of the All Purpose Mobile GPS (The System) is to create a GPS tracking device that can accurately record location and calculate velocity, distance traveled and elevation change even when the satellite signal is lost. This data can later overlay on existing internet-based maps illustrating a trip to oneself or others. The portable tracker consumes very little power achieving several days’ worth of power in a single charge. A solar cell provides a quick battery boost in a pinch. SD Card storage increases compatibility with computers and other forms of data transfer. Data processing, such as viewing the …

The Visual Representation Of Sound For The Hearing Impaired, Jonathan Brophy

Electrical Engineering

There are many difficulties that arise when one is faced with a hearing disability. New applications of advancing technology have the potential to enable designs capable of assisting the hearing impaired with the ability to see sound. This project seeks to provide a user with a visual representation of loud noises detected using small directional microphones. The microphones determine the location of the sound above a set decibel level and a microprocessor determines the approximate location of the sound source and displays a vertical colored bar on a video image in the direction of the noise using virtual reality glasses. …

Lyfi, Kianoosh Salami, Justin Cotton, Elush Shirazpour

Electrical Engineering

This paper will cover the steps necessary to design, build, and manage networkable smart light switches over WiFi via a mobile application. It contains a microcontroller running a real time operating system, a WiFi module, a Java server with SQLite databasing, and a mobile phone application.

LyFi is designed to turn on/off and dim household lights while only requiring the same installation procedure as a less capable dimmer switch. Once installed and connected to a network, LyFi will self-discover and configure. The server automatically propogates a database of nodes where any mobile device running an application can receive an updated …

Programmable Household Led Light Fixture, Jordan Locano

Electrical Engineering

This report details the development and construction of a LED light fixture to be used for household lighting. This document details background information, design ideas, project specifications, production, assembly, testing, and conclusions involved with this project. The goals of this project is to design and build a cost-effective replacement for traditional room lighting that can perform better and last longer than traditional methods.

Discrete Alarm Clock, Travis Moore, Collin Barth

Electrical Engineering

The standard alarm clock, as used daily by millions worldwide, has clear room for modification and improvement. This paper documents an implementation that rectifies many of these flaws. Improvements include adjustable snooze length, an IR remote for ease of use, and an RF headset for discrete alarm use or potential incorporation into a device much like a hearing aid. The processes involved in creating a digital alarm clock, as well as the obstacles met in the implementation of the enhanced design, are detailed within.