Digital Commons Network^™

Solar Panel With Embedded Electronics, Timothy Z. Chen, Albert Panuco

Electrical Engineering

Currently, inverters are needed to utilize solar panels for applications that require AC power. Unfortunately, these inverters are very costly and decrease power efficiency. In this work, two alternatives to using inverters are explored. The first method combines a buck converter with a buck-boost converter to create a sine output. The second method uses switches to change the connections of the solar cells, producing a stepped AC output. Both methods involve embedding the solar cells along with the additional electronics into a solar panel, thus eliminating the need for a separate inverter. Simulations were performed using SIMPLIS, and both methods …

Miso Dc-Dc Farmbot, Quyen Thi Nguyen, Brian Armijo, Astha Adhikari

Electrical Engineering

Making use of renewable energy directly from the location of production requires converting source power into usable power. The specific scope of this project focuses on the DC to DC conversion within a user friendly universal farmbot system. Since renewable sources vary widely in voltage and current, a wide input-range DC to DC converter is desired. Physical isolation, long lifespan, and adverse weather requires safe and reliable final product specifications. The goal of a very wide customer base drives the need for a product that does not require tinkering to get working, but to be usable out of the box …

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 …

Electricity Price Prediction With Computational Intelligence, Toan Hoang

Electrical Engineering

Electricity price depends on numerous factors including the weather, location, time of year/month/day (summer, holidays, day/night, etc.), consumption, and market changes or disruptions. The power loss in the transmission lines and the use of electricity also affect the load's price. Forecasting about the electricity price provides future trends and patterns consumption of the users. Forecasting electricity price is crucially important for producers and consumers in the energy trading markets. It is a complicated task because of the uncertainty behaviors and demand fluctuation. The maximization of profit for participants is highly associated with the bidding strategies. Multiple forecasting electricity price tools …

Plant Growing Control With Modicon M580, Brittany M.Y. Won, Eileen T. Tran

Electrical Engineering

Currently, the Industrial Power and Controls lab is being developed by the Cal Poly Electrical Engineering department. The lab is equipped with recently donated Modicon M580 Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs) from Schneider Electric. In addition to PLCs, Schneider Electric also donated Human Machine Interfaces (HMI) and input/output modules. This project focuses on the creation of a lab experiment that will give future Cal Poly electrical engineering students hands-on experience with this equipment. To show students the broad range of PLCs and the role that electrical engineering plays in various industries, this experiment focuses on the agriculture industry, but more specifically, …

Dual Axis Solar Panel Tracker, Xavier Joseph Lugue, Javier Harrison, Nicholas Ryan Wolfe

Electrical Engineering

Photovoltaic systems generate more energy when orthogonally facing the sun where solar cells absorb the most light. By creating an effective, autonomous solar tracking system, the developed solar panels consistently generate maximum energy while using less power. Dual axis solar trackers surpass single axis trackers in energy generation, however, their cost and reliability provide a significant drawback. This project develops different algorithmic implementations designed to provide optimal and efficient behavior for photovoltaic systems. These algorithms adjust the solar panel’s position appropriately with the sun’s location, weather conditions, and selected operating modes. The solar tracking system’s operations include latitudinal axis capability …

Eeg Midi Controller, Jack Ellison, Eric Bettencourt

Electrical Engineering

One of the greatest challenges for aspiring musicians is the amount of practice and commitment required to become fluent in a traditional instrument. Taken a step further, individuals who have impaired motor skills may be incapable of even executing the physical demands required to practice one. While this device does not create notes directly from a user's brain waves, exploring and designing EEG based musical hardware capable of using a person’s thoughts to control musical devices could pave the way for greater advances. It can also open many doors into psycho-acoustic research, treating the mind's response to hearing music and …

Informing The Creation Of A Financial Literacy Tool For Cal Poly Students, Kelly Michelle Carroll

Communication Studies

This research project examines the wants, needs, and desires of Cal Poly students to inform the creation of a financial literacy tool (tentatively named “MoneySmart”) to be created by another student. The methodologies used to gauge these metrics were a literature review and questionnaire. The literature review aids in understanding research regarding the current state of student financial literacy in the United States, including student attitudes toward the topic. Subsequent findings were used to create the questionnaire, which inquired about students’ financial stress, confidence in their abilities to manage their personal finances, specific interests for the design and contents of …

Cal Poly Microgrid Fixed Pv Array, Christopher L. Ewert, Justin R. Syracuse, Donald A. Syracuse, Jason M. Kehl

Mechanical Engineering

The Mechanical Engineering Department at California Polytechnic State University of San Luis Obispo would like an adjustable, fixed angle solar panel mount to help educate students on basic solar energy principles. Our team has developed a unique sawhorse design utilizing ideation techniques and design selection tools. The selected design allows for multiple panel adjustability and control of both azimuth and tilt angle. Safety concerns are addressed with action plans to mitigate risk. Concept prototypes to justify gearbox functionality and subsystem cohesion was utilized to reduce manufacturing issues. Manufacturing began in March 2020 and proceed through until the end of the …

Abalone Fishermen, Changing Management Practices, And The Creation Of A False Dichotomy, Tyler G. Hoyt

Master's Theses

This thesis traces the history of the abalone fisheries on the California Coast and how those fisheries have been understood and shaped by humans over time. An overarching interest that guides this effort is how indigenous populations used abalone and otters (as well as other marine resources) purposefully for millennia prior to European arrival. However, this work is not entirely focused on prehistory. Instead, it shows how a lack of understanding of this prehistory shaped the conservation efforts of the California Department of Fish and Game and its ultimate decision to close the commercial fishery in 1997. In this sense, …

Design, Validation, And Verification Of The Cal Poly Educational Cubesat Kit Structure, Nicholas B. Snyder

Master's Theses

In this thesis, the development of a structure for use in an educational CubeSat kit is explored. The potential uses of this kit include augmenting existing curricula with aspects of hands on learning, developing new ways of training students on proper space systems engineering practices, and overall contributing to academic capacity building at Cal Poly and its collaborators. The design improves on existing CubeSat kit structures by increasing accessibility to internal components by implementing a modular backplane system, as well as adding the ability to be environmentally tested. Manufacturing of the structure is completed with both additive (Fused Deposition Modeling …

Numerical Methods For Predicting The Dynamic Crushing Response And Energy Absorption Of Composite Aluminum Honeycomb Sandwich Structures, Cody R. Volk

Master's Theses

Edgewise crushing responses of composite aluminum honeycomb sandwich structures were predicted using finite element analysis (FEA) software LS-DYNA by modeling the honeycomb as a material with anisotropic properties. The goal of the project was to develop a process for modeling the sandwich structure to rapidly iterate possible solutions for a safer workstation train table. Current workstation tables are too rigid and may cause injury or death in a head-on collision. Experimental compression tests were used to calibrate the aluminum honeycomb core with material type 26 (MAT 26, honeycomb). A published composite tensile test was used to validate the use of …

Bootstrapping Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games, Mitchell Miller

Master's Theses

Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPGs) are a prominent genre in today's video game industry with the most popular MMORPGs generating billions of dollars in revenue and attracting millions of players. As they have grown, they have become a major target for both technological research and sociological research. In such research, it is nearly impossible to reach the same player scale from any self-made technology or sociological experiments. This greatly limits the amount of control and topics that can be explored. In an effort to make up a lacking or non-existent player-base for custom-made MMORPG research scenarios A.I. agents, …

National Park Cities: A Case For San Luis Obispo, California, Erik Valentine

City and Regional Planning

This project explores the novel planning model of the National Park City, exploring how it has been applied to London, England and developing a theoretical application of how it could be implemented in the City of San Luis Obispo, California. Marked by years of a progressive approach to planning and an engaged community, San Luis Obispo is unique in respecting the natural environment and in expanding environmental preservation and recreational opportunities. Becoming a National Park City would not only be an obvious result to these efforts but would make San Luis Obispo the first of its kind in the United …

Parking By Design, Lane R. Sutherland, Shayna K. Gropen

City and Regional Planning

A comprehensive study of adaptive reuse of urban parking garages.

Innovation In A Housing Crisis: Addressing Moderate Income Housing, Paul Wladyslaw Chytla-Hinze

City and Regional Planning

Innovation in a Housing Crisis: Addressing Moderate Income Housing surveys city-level, as well as regional innovations, that aim to address the shortage of moderate income housing throughout the Bay Area region. This project will explore how these innovations can serve to address the moderate income housing shortage into the future, and will use Redwood City, and the Bay Area, as the local and regional models of the affordable housing crisis.

Urban Planning: Post Pandemic America, Tess Houseman

City and Regional Planning

Today’s urban planners have little to no experience dealing with pandemics as the modern focus in the field has turned away from infectious disease and public health and realigned itself with modest, long-term, encompassing health goals. Considering this, this analysis will focus on two historical case studies of past pandemics and what took place in their planning aftermath. The information garnered will then be used to hypothesize what new changes to state general plan guidelines may be warranted to mitigate the impacts of future pandemics.

Towards Security And Privacy In Networked Medical Devices And Electronic Healthcare Systems, Isabel Jellen

Master's Theses

E-health is a growing eld which utilizes wireless sensor networks to enable access to effective and efficient healthcare services and provide patient monitoring to enable early detection and treatment of health conditions. Due to the proliferation of e-health systems, security and privacy have become critical issues in preventing data falsification, unauthorized access to the system, or eavesdropping on sensitive health data. Furthermore, due to the intrinsic limitations of many wireless medical devices, including low power and limited computational resources, security and device performance can be difficult to balance. Therefore, many current networked medical devices operate without basic security services such …

Writing For Each Other: Dynamic Quest Generation Using In Session Player Behaviors In Mmorpg, Sean Christopher Mendonca

Master's Theses

Role-playing games (RPGs) rely on interesting and varied experiences to maintain player attention. These experiences are often provided through quests, which give players tasks that are used to advance stories or events unfolding in the game. Traditional quests in video games require very specific conditions to be met, and for participating members to advance them by carrying out pre-defined actions. These types of quests are generated with perfect knowledge of the game world and are able to force desired behaviors out of the relevant non-player characters (NPCs). This becomes a major issue in massive multiplayer online (MMO) when other players …

Initial Orbit Determination Error Analysis Of Low-Earth Orbit Rocket Body Debris And Feasibility Study For Debris Cataloguing From One Optical Facility, Kyle Stoker

Master's Theses

This paper is predicated on determining the effectiveness of angles-only initial orbit determination (IOD) methods when limited observational data is available for low-Earth orbit (LEO) rocket body debris. The analysis will be conducted with data obtained from Lockheed Martin Space’s Space Object Tracking (SpOT) facility, focusing on their observational data from 2018 that contains tracking of rocket body debris for less than one minute per overhead pass. After the IOD accuracies are better understood, a feasibility study will follow that investigates the possibility of cataloguing LEO orbital debris from a single optical observation facility with similar observational capabilities as that …

A Floristic Study Of The Cal Poly Swanton Pacific Ranch And A New Combination In Sanicula Crassicaulis (Apiaceae), Sanicula Crassicaulis Var. Nudicaulis, Reed J. Kenny

Master's Theses

Globally we are experiencing a biodiversity crisis and potentially a sixth mass extinction event. Plant specimens are one of the best, most concrete records of biodiversity that we can create. Despite this, the rate of plant collecting has declined steeply since World War II. Now more than ever, plant collections are vital, both for the purpose of quantifying the plant biodiversity in an area and for discovering previously unrecognized diversity.

In Chapter 1, we conducted a floristic survey of the Cal Poly Swanton Pacific Ranch. The Swanton Pacific Ranch (SPR) is located north of the small town of Davenport California, …

Attacking Computer Vision Models Using Occlusion Analysis To Create Physically Robust Adversarial Images, Jacobsen Loh

Master's Theses

Self-driving cars rely on their sense of sight to function effectively in chaotic and uncontrolled environments. Thanks to recent developments in computer vision, specifically convolutional neural networks, autonomous vehicles have developed the ability to see at or above human-level capabilities, which in turn has allowed for rapid advances in self-driving cars. Unfortunately, much like humans being confused by simple optical illusions, convolutional neural networks are susceptible to simple adversarial inputs. As there is no overlap between the optical illusions that fool humans and the adversarial examples that threaten convolutional neural networks, little is understood as to why these adversarial examples …

Host Plant Resistance In Strawberries To Anthracnose And Colonization Of Crown And Root Tissue By Verticillium Dahliae And Macrophomina Phaseolina, Omar A. Gonzalez-Benitez

Master's Theses

Strawberries are considered an important crop in California where in 2018 it was in the top 5 valued fruit and vegetable commodities valued at $2.84 billion accounting for 88% of the total U.S. production. Strawberry production can be severely impacted by soilborne pathogens that can affect strawberry roots, crowns and leaves which can result in plant mortality. As much as 50 to 60% mortality can occur in one field. Pathogens responsible for such losses include Colletotrichum acutatum (syn.C. nymphaeae), Macrophomina phaseolina and Verticillium dahliae. With the phaseout of methyl bromide, host resistance and an understanding of host-pathogen interactions …

The Strawberry Rhizosphere Microbiome: Role On Plant Health And Nutrition, Eric Michael Boyd

Master's Theses

Microbial-root associations are important to help plants cope with abiotic and biotic stressors. Managing these interactions offers an opportunity for improving the efficiency and sustainability of agricultural production. By characterizing the bacterial and archaeal community (via 16S rRNA sequencing) associated with the bulk and rhizosphere soil of sixteen strawberry cultivars in two controlled field studies, we explored the relationships between the soil microbiome and plant resistance to two soilborne fungal pathogens of strawberry (Verticillium dahliae and Macrophomina phaseolina). Overall, the plants had a distinctive rhizosphere microbiome relative to the bulk soil, with higher abundances of known beneficial bacteria …

Barriers To Success: Sheep And Goat Producers In The Service-Grazing Industry, Erin A. Campbell-Craven

Master's Theses

Service-grazing is a novel term for grazing done on land not owned or rented by a livestock producer or manager, for the purpose of land management, and for which the owner or land manager receiving grazing services pays compensation to the service provider. This research project seeks to gather detailed information about producers in the Western United States, providing grazing services under this project’s definition of “service-grazing”, with a focus on those operating in California, in order to discover the business models or practices necessary to be successful within a service-based grazing operation. To this end, an online survey consisting …

Display Significance At Planes Of Fame Air Museum, Callie Ann Maloney

Social Sciences

History museums record and memorialize deeply affecting historical events. They offer opportunities to enhance and build on the history taught. Displayed artifacts and memorabilia can narrate significant stories from the past and provide an educational background. This paper is about the Planes of Fame Air Museum and the focus is on ways that they have significantly memorialized their collection of rare warbirds. I begin by providing background information about the founder and how his visions led him to building a successful aviation museum. The vision of Planes of Fame is to preserve aviation history through the restoration and flying of …

21st Century Policing: Building Trust And Communication, Tyler Merritt Schilling

Social Sciences

My Senior Project was inspired by my desire to become a law enforcement officer and was framed with President Obama’s 21^st Century Task Force Report on Policing. I provide an overview of the literature on 21^st Policing, focusing on Pillar I: Building Trust and Legitimacy. In collaboration with another senior, we hosted a Community Policing Town Hall Forum to address students’ concerns about policing on campus, in SLO, and in other cities across the country. Survey data was collected before and after the event to gauge students’ attitudes towards police and to see how they evaluated the town …

The Subaltern Magazine, Rebecca Fox, Riese Nichols

Social Sciences

The Subaltern intends to reach Cal Poly students who do not feel as if their voices are heard and allow them the platform to share their stories. Our focus is on unheard stories from our campus - whether this involves race, class, gender identity, mental health, ethnicity, culture, or any unique part of one’s identity or experience. We hope that these stories will begin to shed light on what we usually consider “taboo” topics and allow students to feel as if they aren’t alone.

Being a very homogeneous campus, it is important for us to realize that privileged voices are …

The Effect Of Distal Core Flattening And Heat Treatment On 304 Stainless Steel Guide Wires, Andrew Spencer Yap, Bryce Eric Veit, Matthew Frederick Lopez Villena

Materials Engineering

The mechanical response of 304 stainless steel guide wires due to different temper conditions and amounts of flattening is to be explored in this project. For this specific project, there is no public literature on the mechanical properties of guide wires with the above conditions through tensile testing or Turns to Failure Testing. To address this, the project with Abbott Vascular will measure the mechanical properties of guide wires using the aforementioned factors. Due to a lack of previous literature on this research topic, there are no quantitative goals for the project, however, any new research compiled in this area …

The Effect Of Communication Medium On Mental Health Outcomes, Brooke Emily Lyon

Communication Studies

This study examined which form of mental health treatment was considered to be most appealing if an individual is seeking help for a mental health related concern. Furthermore, it detected which communication media was perceived to make people feel the most comfortable, bring the most benefits to mental health, and was the easiest to access when it comes to mental health treatment. This study utilized a posttest-only experimental design to manipulate the different images of communication media that participants saw during the context of a hypothetical therapy session (face-to-face, group, or digital application). Following the experiment, differences amongst groups were …