Hardware Systems Commons^™

Potential Security Vulnerabilities In Raspberry Pi Devices With Mitigation Strategies, Briana Tolleson

Cybersecurity Undergraduate Research Showcase

For this research project I used a Raspberry Pi device and conducted online research to investigate potential security vulnerabilities along with mitigation strategies. I configured the Raspberry Pi by using the proper peripherals such as an HDMI cord, a microUSB adapter that provided 5V and at least 700mA of current, a TV monitor, PiSwitch, SD Card, keyboard, and mouse. I installed the Rasbian operating system (OS). The process to install the Rasbian took about 10 minutes to boot starting at 21:08 on 10/27/2023 and ending at 21:18. 1,513 megabytes (MB) was written to the SD card running at (2.5 MB/sec). …

Resilient, Sustainable, And Secure Systems Support For Ultra-Low-Power Computational Things, Nicole Tobias

All Dissertations

Wireless battery-free and energy-harvesting devices are expanding the reach and vision of the Internet of Things, where trillions of embedded computational things interconnect ubiquitously around us and inform many different aspects of our everyday lives. Designing these systems without batteries and interconnecting wires lowers maintenance, environmental, and economic costs while also extending device lifetime and deployment opportunities. Over the last decade, research on these ultra-low-power embedded sensors and systems has dramatically increased — enabling new and exciting prospects in many different scientific fields, from smart building and health monitoring applications to animal and activity tracking.

These systems are not without …

Deep Learning Frameworks For Accelerated Magnetic Resonance Image Reconstruction Without Ground Truths, Ibsa Kumara Jalata

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is typically a slow process because of its sequential data acquisition. To speed up this process, MR acquisition is often accelerated by undersampling k-space signals and solving an ill-posed problem through a constrained optimization process. Image reconstruction from under-sampled data is posed as an inverse problem in traditional model-based learning paradigms. While traditional methods use image priors as constraints, modern deep learning methods use supervised learning with ground truth images to learn image features and priors. However, in some cases, ground truth images are not available, making supervised learning impractical. Recent data-centric learning frameworks such as …

Electronic Note-String Detector, Gavin Garcia-Rossi, Tommy Smail

Electrical Engineering

As the virtual space has become a dominant part of everyone’s day-to-day lives, many normal face-to-face interactions and services have not yet been facilitated by adapting technology. One of these prevailing areas is music lessons. Over Zoom meetings, or other virtual platforms, it is tremendously challenging to teach students. These challenges include recognizing student mistakes audibly and visually, and being able to give confident feedback on the incorrect notes played by learning musicians. Without having to delve into improving the complex systems that would be required to improve audio, video, and connection quality of these connections, we have another solution …

Towards Enabling Usable Batteryless Wearables, Arwa Alsubhi

All Dissertations

Wearable devices have become ubiquitous in modern technology, providing a convenient way for a large number of users to monitor their health and track their daily activities. However, despite their numerous benefits, wearable devices are not without their challenges. One of the most significant issues is the need to recharge their batteries, which can disrupt users’ daily routines and might result in the discontinuation of device use.

Replacing batteries with capacitors and charging them using the available harvested energy from the surrounding environment (e.g., kinetic, thermal, or solar energy) eliminates the burden of recharging or replacing batteries, resulting in convenient, …

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 …

In Situ Water Sensing Systems: Research On Advancements In Environmental Monitoring, Abigail Seibel

Honors Program: Senior Projects (Public)

In this work, two sensing systems were researched in order to improve in situ environmental monitoring. The first is a pH and Total Alkalinity sensor used to determine these characteristics of sea water. I explored the facets of this sensor over a 7-week internship with Dr. Ellen Briggs in her lab in summer of 2023. The second is a more holistic sensing system that reads temperature, turbidity, and pressure used for studying environmental characteristics of Alaskan bever ponds. Both systems were developed in close collaboration with scientists who are collecting data to better understand the impacts of climate change. Better …

Classification Of Large Scale Fish Dataset By Deep Neural Networks, Priyanka Adapa

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

The development of robust and efficient fish classification systems has become essential to preventing the rapid depletion of aquatic resources and building conservation strategies. A deep learning approach is proposed here for the automated classification of fish species from underwater images. The proposed methodology leverages state-of-the-art deep neural networks by applying the compact convolutional transformer (CCT) architecture, which is famous for faster training and lower computational cost. In CCT, data augmentation techniques are employed to enhance the variability of the training data, reducing overfitting and improving generalization. The preliminary outcomes of our proposed method demonstrate a promising accuracy level of …

Enhancing Accident Investigation Using Traffic Cctv Footage, Aksharapriya Peddi

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

This Culminating Experience Project investigated how the densenet-161 model will perform on accident severity prediction compared to proposed methods. The research questions are: (Q1) What is the impact of usage of augmentation techniques on imbalanced datasets? (Q2) How will the hyper parameter tuning affect the model performance? (Q3) How effective is the proposed model compared to existing work? The findings are: Q1. The effectiveness of our model depends on the implementation of augmentation techniques that pay attention to handling imbalanced datasets. Our dataset poses a challenge due to distribution of classes in terms of accident severity. To address this challenge …

Qasm-To-Hls: A Framework For Accelerating Quantum Circuit Emulation On High-Performance Reconfigurable Computers, Anshul Maurya

Theses and Dissertations

High-performance reconfigurable computers (HPRCs) make use of Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) for efficient emulation of quantum algorithms. Generally, algorithm-specific architectures are implemented on the FPGAs and there is very little flexibility. Moreover, mapping a quantum algorithm onto its equivalent FPGA emulation architecture is challenging. In this work, we present an automation framework for converting quantum circuits to their equivalent FPGA emulation architectures. The framework processes quantum circuits represented in Quantum Assembly Language (QASM) and derives high-level descriptions of the hardware emulation architectures for High-Level Synthesis (HLS) on HPRCs. The framework generates the code for a heterogeneous architecture consisting of a …

Kwad - Ksu All Weather Autonomous Drone, Nick Farinacci, Sebastian Gomez, Stewart Baker, Ed Sheridan

Symposium of Student Scholars

"KWAD" or "KSU all-Weather Autonomous Drone" project was sponsored by Ultool, LLC to the KSU Research and Service Foundation to create a lightweight drone capable of capturing HD video during all-weather operations. The conditions of all-weather operation include rainfall of one inch per hour and wind speeds of up to twenty miles per hour. In addition, a global minimum structural safety factor of two is required to ensure the system's integrity in extreme weather conditions. Potential mission profiles include autonomous aerial delivery, topological mapping in high moisture areas, security surveillance, search and rescue operations, emergency transportation of medical supplies, and …

The Roadmap To An Improved Braille Display Design, Emma Garofalo, Trey Alexander, Luke Shankland, Michael Smith, Michael Cheng, Michael Bishai, Lauren Sun

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

Our innovative braille display, focused on affordability and education, fills a notable void in the market of refreshable braille displays, which are typically costly and not designed primarily for educational use. This product stands out as an economical educational aid for people with visual impairments. It features a system where pressing a keyboard alphabet key corresponds to specific braille pins, allowing for the display of letters or characters. Additionally, our design can represent simple geometric shapes, like circles or squares, using the braille pins. When these pins are raised, the user can feel the braille representation of the character or …

Custom Led Dashboard Integration For The Cal Poly Racing Team, Josue Hernandez

Computer Engineering

The Custom LED Dashboard Integration was made for the Cal Poly Racing Team, specifically the BAJA division. The dashboard was made as a way to combat the current limitations endured from the past methods used to display critical information of the vehicle to the car. The display was made to combat issues of limited quantity of data being able to be displayed to the driver and its small readability was an issue, the display helped combat that by providing a greater quantity of data being able to be sent and displayed on the display and the information being displayed having …

Drones For Marine Science And Agriculture, David Caldera, Sai Murthy

College of Engineering Summer Undergraduate Research Program

Our research project was launched at Cal Poly in 2019 with the goal of assisting researchers at the CSULB Shark Lab in detecting sharks from aerial images. Under the guidance of Dr. Franz J. Kurfess, students trained an object detection algorithm using shark images and were able to achieve high rate of detection. Following this success, the team has constructed multiple drones and expanded their research to include applications in the fields of agriculture and ecology. This summer the goal is to use a iPhone 14 Pro in lieu of a traditional camera system for real-time object recognition. Object detection …

Watch: A Distributed Clock Time Offset Estimation Tool On The Platform For Open Wireless Data-Driven Experimental Research, Cassie Jeng

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

The synchronization of the clocks used at different devices across space is of critical importance in wireless communications networks. Each device’s local clock differs slightly, affecting the times at which packets are transmitted from different nodes in the network. This thesis provides experimentation and software development on POWDER, the Platform for Open, Wireless Data-driven Experimental Research, an open wireless testbed across the University of Utah campus. We build upon Shout, a suite of Python scripts that allow devices to iteratively transmit and receive with each other and save the collected data. We introduce WATCH, an experimental method to estimate clock …

Sel4 On Risc-V - Developing High Assurance Platforms With Modular Open-Source Architectures, Michael A. Doran Jr

Masters Theses

Virtualization is now becoming an industry standard for modern embedded systems. Modern embedded systems can now support multiple applications on a single hardware platform while meeting power and cost requirements. Virtualization on an embedded system is achieved through the design of the hardware-software interface. Instruction set architecture, ISA, defines the hardware-software interface for an embedded system. At the hardware level the ISA, provides extensions to support virtualization.

In addition to an ISA that supports hypervisor extensions it is equally important to provide a hypervisor completely capable of exploiting the benefits of virtualization for securing modern embedded systems. Currently there does …

Virtual Prototyping Of Pebb Based Power Electronics System For Ground Vehicles, Yi Li

All Theses

Power electronics are heavily involved in power and energy systems in plenty of applications nowadays. The increase of demand brings more challenges into simulations for development. Considering the complexity of the systems and high frequency operational conditions, this paper presents comprehensive research on modeling, simulating, and validation on ground vehicle propulsion system applications.

To reduce the computational burden, the Power Electronics Building Blocks concept is utilized to simplify the structure of modeling under different conversion scenarios in ground vehicle systems. In addition, the Average and Switching versions models are included. To speedup the simulation, the engagement of advanced computing technique …

Characterization And Estimation Of Musculoskeletal Pain Using Machine Learning, Boluwatife Faremi

Master's Theses

Traditional scales utilized for recording pain are known to be highly subjective and biased due to inaccuracies in recollecting actual pain intensities. As a result, machine learning (ML) models that are trained using these scores as ground truth are reported to have low performance for objective pain classification because of the huge disparity between what was felt in moments of pain and the scores recorded afterward.

In the present study, two devices were designed for gathering real-time, continuous in-session subjective pain scores and the recording of the autonomic nervous system (ANS) altered endodermal (EDA) activity. 24 participants were recruited to …

Electrical Vehicle Charging Infrastructure Design And Operations, Yu Yang, Hen-Geul Yeh

Mineta Transportation Institute

California aims to achieve five million zero-emission vehicles (ZEVs) on the road by 2030 and 250,000 electrical vehicle (EV) charging stations by 2025. To reduce barriers in this process, the research team developed a simulation-based system for EV charging infrastructure design and operations. The increasing power demand due to the growing EV market requires advanced charging infrastructures and operating strategies. This study will deliver two modules in charging station design and operations, including a vehicle charging schedule and an infrastructure planning module for the solar-powered charging station. The objectives are to increase customers’ satisfaction, reduce the power grid burden, and …

Protecting The Infrastructure Of Michigan: Analyzing And Understanding Internet Infrastructure, Samuel Blaser, Travis Munyer, Damian Ramirez, Lester Juarez, Jackson Servant

Theses/Capstones/Creative Projects

The Michigan Army National Guard DCOE is hoping to increase their understanding of the physical, electrical, protocol, and logical topography of internet service. In order to understand the infrastructure of the internet, information must be collected on its pieces. By studying, describing, and illustrating the infrastructure of the global internet we can develop hardening tactics, improve user training, and develop contingency plans in the case of an attack. The research is focused on where data lives, locating data centers in the region, identifying global infrastructure and who owns it, and potential for hardening. An interactive map has been created in …