Engineering Commons^™

Fish Tracker: A Software Defined Radio Application, Cody Herndon, Serena Makin

Electrical and Computer Engineering

Flying a software defined radio allows us to reduce hardware to create a time saving and modular method to track tagged fish for the purpose of learning how rivers change from year to year.

Fitness Watch, Jason Macy

Electrical and Computer Engineering

The Fitness Watch is consists of a microcontroller ideally worn on the wrist, a heart rate sensor, and a PC based application. Its an amazing tool for facilitating and tracking the effectiveness of workouts. It includes features such as current heart rate, workout recording, months of storage and, calendar and graph based tracking of calories burned.

Hay And Silage Product Applicator System, Marshall Folkman

Electrical and Computer Engineering

This project is an agricultural system for applying hay and silage preservatives at the time of bailing or swathing. This system provides a solution which enables customers to have better automated control, monitoring, and flexibility over the flow-rates at which product is applied to their crops.

Headphone Tester, Derrick Chugg, Michael Welch

Electrical and Computer Engineering

Have you ever wondered if your set of headphones were the best? Or if you always wanted to try those expensive headphones but have never got the money? The Headphone Tester will solve this problem by,

• Correcting the frequency response of your headphones
• Altering your headphones frequency response to sound just like another headphone

With the Headphone Tester, you can test any set of headphones with just your current headphones.

Model Aircraft Stabilization Control System, Braden Allen, Brandon Packer, Justin Weight

Electrical and Computer Engineering

Many first time hobby fliers find it difficult to control a remote control airplane. The goal of this project is to make an inexpensive control system to aid beginner flyers in controlling the aircraft.

Motorized Automated Dumbbell (M.A.D.), Aaron Anderson, Tyler Tolman

Electrical and Computer Engineering

The MAD system is a space saving dumbbell set. How does it work? Two dumbbells, with weighted plates on each end of the dumbbells, are placed on a platform. A person selects a desired weight by the push of a button or through an app on a mobile device. The weight range a person can select is from 2.5 pounds to 52.5 pounds for each dumbbell. A motor then grabs the unwanted plates at the ends of the dumbbells, leaving only the selected weight.

Multipurpose Fabrication Tool, Ryan Hathaway

Electrical and Computer Engineering

Many fabrication processes share one thing in common: they are carried out by a computer controlled machine using XYZ motion. The purpose of this project is to build a multipurpose fabrication tool with a solid XYZ platform that can easily be adapted to take advantage of several different fabrication methods. Since the XYZ motion is the most expensive portion of these types of machines, the cost can be reduced significantly by giving the XYZ motion multiple uses.

This multipurpose fabrication tool is constructed using rigid, high precision components for precise repeatable operations including, but not limited to: milling, 3D printing, …

Iris Real Time Closed-Captioning System, Kyler Anderson, Bradley Diamond

Electrical and Computer Engineering

The IRIS Real Time Closed-captioning System provides real-time closed-captioning of the surrounding verbal conversation to improve understanding for the user. Millions affected by hearing impairments in the US¹. Existing translation methods are not sufficient in many situations. Our objectives include:

• Translate near real time
• Achieve high accuracy
• Allow eye contact
• Allow mobility

By making a speech-to-text translation available instantly and alongside the visual cues of the conversation, individuals with hearing impairments will be connected to a world of possible conversations.

Quadcopter Chase Cam, Dorothy Johnson, Cameron Madsen, Jacob Rice

Electrical and Computer Engineering

The Project

• Quadcopter with detachable GoPro camera
• Free open source software to allow the quadcopter to chase
• Autonomously follows within a specified distance and elevation
• GPS dongle to provide accurate location

Adaptive Scare Hall, Jeffrey Williams, Ryan Anderson

Electrical and Computer Engineering

We give a detailed overview of one way an adaptive scare hall can be implemented. We show the common problems with todays scare halls and how our method solves those problems. We then show the inner workings of our scare hall and materials needed. We finally show some data collection we obtained while running our scare hall.

Smart Carabiner, Jeffrey Lunt, Craig Manning

Electrical and Computer Engineering

Real-time measurement and notification of equipment strain

Model Rocket Data Logger, Brian Carrick

Electrical and Computer Engineering

Model rocketry is very popular among people of all ages, and has the opportunity to be fun, engaging and educational. By creating a system to store flight data and images allows a fun hobby to also become a learning experience.

Solar-Powered Backpack: Delivering Portable Solar Power, Courtney Richards

Electrical and Computer Engineering

The solar-powered backpack will provide portable power while exposed to sunlight or for the duration of battery life. This enables the user to provide power to electronic devices at any time.

Star Constellation Finder, David A. Ware

Electrical and Computer Engineering

The SCF is designed to help amateurs astronomers, small groups, boy scouts and others find star constellations in the sky. The user needs to be able to identify the North Star so that they can orient the SCF. The SCF uses the North Star as a point of reference to find other stars in the sky.

Texel Image Library, Seth Andrews

Electrical and Computer Engineering

The purpose of the project was to create a library for working with the texel image format.

Uav Cattle Tracker, Shaun Finlinson

Electrical and Computer Engineering

Every year cattle ranchers loose millions of dollars to preventable causes or curable illnesses.

The purpose of the UAV Cattle Tracker is to provide cattle ranchers daily cattle health and location monitoring for range cattle, improving overall food production efficiencies and increased profits.

Smart Laboratory Instrument Control Framework, Kevin Kennedy, Justin Jonas, Robbie Schaap

Electrical and Computer Engineering

A framework to simplify communication with laboratory instruments and facilitate powerful, automated testing scripts.

• Easier to use than traditional lab software like LabVIEW or MATLAB for instrumentation
• Compatible with any instrument from any vendor
• Works on Windows, Mac and Linux
• Easy to add new instruments
• Powerful object-oriented software architecture that is easy to learn

Lateral Control Of A Vehicle Platoon, Sam Mitchell, Kyle Hymas

Electrical and Computer Engineering

Nationally, freeway congestion costs the economy over $1 trillion annually. Automated vehicles are part of a solution that will prevent future costly and time-wasting traffic jams. The standard lanekeeping control algorithms aren't effective in many adverse environments. Vehicle following is a part of the solution to this complex problem.

The project demonstrates a vehicle following system that will be used by the SATS Group at USU.

Visual Servo Robotic Hand (Vsrh), Ryan Lamoreaux, Amber Mcdougal, Quinn Thomson, Christopher Green

Electrical and Computer Engineering

Our goal with this project was to combine image processing and control systems to inspire future projects. We also wanted to get a better understanding of robotics and help make them more intuitive and less restrictive. Our VSRH mimics a user’s hand without having to physically control the VSRH.

Emergency Vital Signs Monitor, Derek Jensen

Electrical and Computer Engineering

According to the Center for Disease Control, every year there are over 120 million visits to the emergency department.

In 2010 alone, at least 55 milion of those visits required care from a trauma center.

As an EMT, it is expected that an initial assessment and transport decision is made within ten minutes of arriving on scene. They need the best information possible to make an informed decision.

Wheelchair Follower, Clint Fernelius, Jeanne Munk, Tyler Travis

Electrical and Computer Engineering

The wheelchair follower is an introductory project in using computer vision in autonomous following applications. It is designed to follow a leader in an orthogonal position. The leader is designated by wearing a badge which the system tracks using computer vision. It also uses various sensors to detect obstacles for safety.

Clinical Significance Of Response Shift In A Spine Interventional Clinical Trial, Robin Carlson

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

The effectiveness of treatments for degenerative spine conditions, where the primary symptom is back pain, is typically determined using patient-reported quality of life (QoL) measures. However, patients may adjust their internal standards when scoring QoL based on factors other than their health. This response shift phenomenon could confound the interpretation of study data and impact effectiveness conclusions. In the current study, response shift was examined using structural equation modeling (SEM) and previously collected clinical trial data comparing 2 minimally invasive medical devices in lumbar spinal stenosis patients through 1 year postintervention. In subject QoL results, reprioritization shift between 3 months …

High-Resolution Bottom-Loss Estimation Using The Ambient-Noise Vertical Coherence Function, Lanfranco Muzi, Martin Siderius, Jorge E. Quijano, Stan E. Dosso

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

The seabed reflection loss (shortly "bottom loss") is an important quantity for predicting transmission loss in the ocean. A recent passive technique for estimating the bottom loss as a function of frequency and grazing angle exploits marine ambient noise (originating at the surface from breaking waves, wind, and rain) as an acoustic source. Conventional beamforming of the noise field at a vertical line array of hydrophones is a fundamental step in this technique, and the beamformer resolution in grazing angle affects the quality of the estimated bottom loss. Implementation of this technique with short arrays can be hindered by their …

Modular Timing Constraints For Delay-Insensitive Systems, Hoon Park, Anping He, Marly Roncken, Xiaoyu Song, Ivan Sutherland

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

This paper introduces ARCtimer, a framework for modeling, generating, verifying, and enforcing timing constraints for individual self-timed handshake components. The constraints guarantee that the component’s gate-level circuit implementation obeys the component’s handshake protocol specification. Because the handshake protocols are delayinsensitive, self-timed systems built using ARCtimer-verified components are also delay-insensitive. By carefully considering time locally, we can ignore time globally. ARCtimer comes early in the design process as part of building a library of verified components for later system use. The library also stores static timing analysis (STA) code to validate and enforce the component’s constraints in any self-timed system built …

Coupled-Oscillator Associative Memory Array Operation For Pattern Recognition, Dmitri E. Nikonov, Gyorgy Csaba, Wolfgang Porod, Tadashi Shibata, Danny Voils, Dan Hammerstrom, Ian A. Young, George I. Bourianoff

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

Operation of the array of coupled oscillators underlying the associative memory function is demonstrated for various interconnection schemes (cross-connect, star phase keying and star frequency keying) and various physical implementation of oscillators (van der Pol, phase-locked loop, spin torque). The speed of synchronization of oscillators and the evolution of the degree of matching is studied as a function of device parameters. The dependence of errors in association on the number of the memorized patterns and the distance between the test and the memorized pattern is determined for Palm, Furber and Hopfield association algorithms.

Wavelet-Coupled Machine Learning Methods For Drought Forecast Utilizing Hybrid Meteorological And Remotely-Sensed Data, R. Tan, Marek Perkowski

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

In this study, a statistical drought early warning method is proposed using novel machine learning algorithms, with the inclusion of multiple drought-related attributes from precipitation, satellite-derived land cover vegetation indices, and surface discharge. The forecast is made for the long-term hydrological drought in the region of Central Valley, California. The wavelet transform analysis is employed in combination with support vector regression and artificial neural network algorithms for improving the drought prediction effectiveness. The performance of the drought prediction is evaluated using three statistical metrics: Coefficient of Determination (R2 ), Root-Mean-Square Error (RMSE), and Mean-Absolute-Error (MAE). The results clearly indicate that …

Simultaneous X-Ray Diffraction And Phase-Contrast Imaging For Investigating Material Deformation Mechanisms During High-Rate Loading, M Hudspeth, T Sun, N Parab, Z Guo, K Fezzaa, S Luo, Weinong W. Chen

Purdue Energetics Research Center Articles

No abstract provided.

Design And Implementation Of An Interactive Animatronic System For Guest Response Analysis, Brian Burns

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

In theme park based entertainment applications, there is a need for interactive, autonomous animatronic systems to create engaging and compelling experiences for the guests. The animatronic figures must identify the guests and recognize their status in dynamic interactions for enhanced acceptance and effectiveness as socially interactive agents, in the general framework of human-robot interactions. The design and implementation of an interactive, autonomous animatronic system in form of a tabletop dragon and the comparisons of guest responses in its passive and interactive modes are presented in this work. The dragon capabilities include a four degrees-of-freedom head, moving wings, tail, jaw, blinking …

Teacher Influence On Elementary School Students’ Participation In Science, Technology, Engineering, And Mathematics, Courtney Hartman

Honors College Theses

The purpose of this study is to explore the influence of elementary school teachers on encouraging students’ interest and participation in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics. The researcher sought to understand what methods teachers use in their classrooms to encourage students to participate in STEM subjects and programs. This mixed methods study consisted of a questionnaire to collect quantitative data, as well as an interview of selected teachers who participated in the questionnaire to collect qualitative data. The data was analyzed to determine the overall perceptions of teachers regarding the importance of encouraging students to participate in STEM. The qualitative …

Release, Stability And Functionality Of Nanodelivered Hydrophobic (Lutein And Beta-Carotene) And Hydrophilic (Folic Acid) Antioxidants Using Zein Nanoparticles, Thanida Chuacharoen

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Nanodelivery systems enable innovations that can benefit foods and human health on a large scale in the coming years. The instabilities of antioxidants during food processing and during digestion are drawbacks that can be successfully addressed by nanoentrapment. This research provided technical strategies to synthesize zein nanoparticles loaded with hydrophobic/hydrophilic antioxidants, and to study the release profiles and physical stability of nanocarriers and chemical stability of entrapped bioactives under on-shelf and GI conditions. The results supported the potential of zein nanoparticles stabilized by surfactants to improve chemical stability of entrapped lutein, and to slowly release lutein under PBS conditions. Same …