Engineering Commons^™

Psuedo-Randomly Controlled Analog Synthesizer, Jared Huntington

Electrical Engineering

The goal of this project was to design and build a portable box recreating classic sounds heard in science fiction films. These include sounds ranging from droning hums to bloops and bleeps. Currently no other device is made specifically for generating these sounds. The user controls and manipulates the sounds produced using a combination of switches and knobs to shape the sound generation. The sounds are generated using analog electronics. The project was successful in meeting the desired goal by designing and building a Randomizer, MIDI controller, VCO, LFO, VCA, Ring Modulator, and Fuzz Section. The resulting device is useful …

Musicman Communications System, Dan Strengier

Electrical Engineering

The MusicMan portable music mixer is a solution for users who enjoy listening to music and would also like to communicate to friends on a walkie-talkie system. The MusicMan provides the user the ability to simultaneously listen to an MP3 player and operate a communications device, such as a walkie-talkie.

Punching Bag Trainer, Gian Delacruz

Electrical Engineering

Martial artists, such as boxers, kick boxers, and karate practitioners, use punching bags in training all the time to work on technique, speed and power but there hasn’t really been a good way to train reaction and combination speed (a combination is a string of strikes) without the aid of a training partner. Reaction and combination speed are important in competition because a faster competitor can attack successfully before his or her opponent has the time to react. This device aims to help martial artists increase reaction and combination speed through the use of randomly flashing targets attached to a …

Protected Ir Input System, Kevin Ersoy

Electrical Engineering

The result of this project is a product that may be used to apply a digital input to a system without physically touching a device. The combination of a modulated IR signal and reflective technology produces this remote actuation. The signal emitter should produce the modulated IR light, and the receiver should continuously wait for this signal to be received. If the IR signal should encounter an obstruction causing reflection at the appropriate distance, it will be reflected directly into the receiving device. This project may be extended to include multiple duplicate systems in proximity by transmitting a modulated digital …

High Contrast Grayscale Object Tracking Embedded System Design, Scott Donald Neally

Electrical Engineering

The purpose of this project is to prove that a real-time object-tracking camera can be implemented using the Digilent NEXYS board with Xilinx Platform Studio. With great ambition I set to implement the camera with RGB color tracking of bright green objects. This would make segmentation between the object of interest and its background much easier, allowing less stringent requirements on the background color beyond the object. Because of time restraints, the actual implementation remains as 8-bit grayscale, where the object of interest is intended to be white and highly contrasted from its black background. A simple algorithm is used …

Automated Basketball Return System, Victor Mendoza, Chris Chamberlain

Electrical Engineering

The project is meant to assist a basketball player in their practicing. The project hangs directly on the basketball rim and automatically rotates to find the player on the court. Once the player is detected, the automated basketball return system (ABRS) stays focused in the direction of the player so that any baskets successfully made will be funneled back to the player. When the player moves from center, IR motion detectors find which direction you moved to and rotates accordingly, until the player is focused in front of the funnel again. If at any time the player is absent from …

Dc-Dc Converter For Harvesting Energy From An Exercise Bike, Henry Ureh, Chris Henry

Electrical Engineering

Create an efficient buck-boost converter that adapts to input voltage range from ~3.8V to 70V, and outputs 13.7V DC, the voltage required by a charge controller to charge a battery. The energy stored in the battery will be supplied back to the grid.

The cost of energy saved by the converter should eventually cover the initial price of the converter. The converter should help reduce the net power consumption of the exercise machines used in the Cal Poly gym

Switching Circuit For A Permanent Magnet Dc Motor, Alex Boatman

Electrical Engineering

The project is a circuit that will basically supply current from the battery to the different stator coils at opportune moments. With a hall-effect sensor on the shaft as a feedback to a microcontroller, I was able to toggle switches based on the position of the shaft at the moments where we would be using as little power as possible. The operation of the control circuit works similar to a stepper motor; it takes a signal from the microcontroller that is sent to some FET drivers, which in turn sends signals to the FETs to open or close as the …

Wireless Pedometer, Jeffrey Lease

Electrical Engineering

No abstract provided.