Electrical and Computer Engineering Commons^™

Wireless Kick Pedal, Jacob Wise, Ryan Kinyo, Bradley Toth, Ian Zanath

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

The goal of the project is to build a wireless kick pedal that allows accessibility to drummers that have leg or foot disabilities and add versatility to multi-instrumentalists looking to add percussion while playing another instrument. The proposed pedal is designed in two main parts, a wearable band that tracks the player’s movement, and a hammer mechanism that receives actuation commands from the wearable band to move the hammer and deliver a drumbeat. The band is designed to be worn on several parts of the body, including the ankle, knee, thigh, or even the arm depending on the user’s situation. …

"Demeter" Soil Monitoring System, Ryan Matthews, Rachel Rummer, Temilolu Fayomi, Alex Fuller

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

The purpose of this project is to develop a soil monitoring system that can remotely sense and relay soil conditions back to a user. The deMETER soil probe, Demeter is the Greek goddess of the harvest, is designed to aid hobbyist gardeners, small-scale farms, and nurseries to monitor their dynamic soil conditions and maximize their harvest. The probe is a self-powered system that can monitor the moisture and essential nutrients of the soil profile to determine which areas should receive water and fertilizer. This would significantly cut water and fertilizer waste. The solution will include an embedded system with sensors …

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 …

Concusion Detection Headband Design, John Durkin, Noah Lewis, John Michel

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

Concussion in sports is a prevalent medical issue. It can be difficult for medical professionals to diagnose concussions. With the fast pace nature of many sports, and the damaging effects of concussions, it is important that any concussion risks are assessed immediately. There is a growing trend of wearable technology that collects data such as steps, and provides the wearer with in-depth information regarding their performance. The Smart Headband project created a wearable that can record impact data and provide the wearer with a detailed analysis on their risk of sustaining a concussion. The Smart Headband uses accelerometers and gyroscopes …

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.

Augmented Reality Billiards Assistant, Sarah Medved

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

The game of pool is an extremely popular activity, with approximately 36 million participants yearly. As with any game of pool, the most basic skill the player must possess is the ability to accurately aim and hit the cue ball. It would be helpful to the player if they had a system which would assist with aiming by predicting the trajectories of a shot before the shot is actually made. These trajectory predictions can serve as a guide to the player and allow them to adjust their cue position before each shot. This lets the player explore many different options …

Smart Garage Opener, Jacob Wasson

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

The purpose of this research project was to design an anti-theft device that interfaces with a standard garage door opener to allow packages to easily be delivered into a garage in a safe and secure manner. Primary functionality of the device is to use a package’s tracking number and corresponding barcode to open and close a garage door to a preset height so that a package can be delivered inside the garage before it closes. My contribution to the project revolved around the programming and board design of the microcontroller circuit that controls the input and output signals of the …

The Smartbobber, Zachary Pyle, Nick Spoutz, Zachary Hutson, Ryan Pascal

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

In short, the fishing bobber connects to a smartphone app (also designed by members on the team) to notify the user of fish bite data via Bluetooth connection. Additionally, the smartBobber is able to set the hook on fish autonomously and alert the user when it does so. This is possible by the use of a linear solenoid that is spring loaded. Circuitry on the bobber detects the pull distance on the plunger of the solenoid and transmits this data to the user in real time. Once the solenoid has passed a certain pull threshold, the solenoid completes a 12V …

Design Of Shape-Conforming Nosecone For Optimal Fluid Flow From Transonic To Supersonic Range, Anna Tombazzi

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

Modern flight vehicles, such as rockets, missiles, and airplanes, experience a force caused by forebody wave drag during the flight. This drag force is induced when the frontal point of each vehicle breaks the pressure wave during flight. Efforts to reduce this wave drag force to improve flight efficiency include modifying the nosecone profile of the flight vehicles to lower the drag force.

This project revolved around creating a design to make the transformation of nosecone shapes from a ¾ Parabolic profile to a ½ Power Series profile possible, mid-flight. Using a novel nosecone assembly, shape memory alloys (SMAs) and …

Soil Moisture Sensor, Jaclyn Miller, Derek Bitecofer, Seung Jun Lee

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

Since water is an important resource and not all communities around the world can afford to be liberal with their water needs; it has become important to use available water as efficiently as possible, especially in agriculture. For the purpose of reducing the overwatering of crops, an unattended ground moisture sensor can be implemented to measure the moisture level in the soil surrounding the plants. This will allow a farmer to know when to water or stop watering crops. For convenience, the moisture data information should be transmitted wirelessly to the user. The design of an unattended ground moisture sensor …

Navigational Heads-Up Display, Alex Walenchok, Nicholas Seifert, Joshua Reed, Joshua Humphrey

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

One problem drivers face is distraction from looking at their mobile device while navigating rather than watching the road. This problem can be solved with a heads-up display placed directly on the driver’s windshield. By using a mobile device with a custom GPS application, the following design will be able to send GPS data to a device that will display navigational information on a car windshield. The design includes two primary components, a mobile device and a System Unit, where the System Unit is composed of a portable power supply, a single board computer, and a display. For the design, …

Hvac Monitoring System, Ryan Gerhart, Tyler Miller

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

This report outlines the design and implementation stages of the development of a heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) airflow, humidity, and temperature monitoring device. The purpose of the device is to collect data to inform manufacturers and users about the current operational status of the HVAC system in place. Information about the airflow, humidity, and temperature is to be collected and wirelessly transmitted to a central database, where the data can be stored for later use and processing. The sensors and transmitter are to be powered using only energy harvested from the system, so that this data can be …

Pothole Reporting System, Brian G. Simmons Mr., Alissa L. Mcgill Ms., Elizabeth J. Hammell Ms., Sean D. Querry Mr.

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

The purpose of this project is to create a pothole detection device that can be attached to the underside of a commercial vehicle. Potholes cost motorists around 6.4 billion dollars annually, thus demonstrating the need for a system to aid with the detections and reporting of potholes. The four systems we needed to consider for the implementation of this project were the power system, the sensing system, the data processing system, and the reporting and logging system. Power pulled from the vehicle will enable the sensors and data processing module. The data processing module will analyze the readings from the …

Pothole Reporting System, Alissa L. Mcgill, Brian G. Simmons, Sean D. Querry, Elizabeth J. Hammell

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

The purpose of this project is to create a pothole detection device that can be attached to the underside of a commercial vehicle. Potholes cost motorists around 6.4 billion dollars annually, thus demonstrating the need for a system to aid with the detection and reporting of potholes. The four systems we needed to consider for the implementation of this project were the power system, the sensing system, the data processing system, and the reporting and logging system. Power pulled from the vehicle will enable the sensors and data processing module. The data processing module will analyze the readings from the …