Computer Engineering Commons^™

Pl-X (Roborodentia), Kelly Leung, William Luo, Jeffrey Tang

Computer Engineering

Pl-x is the name of the robot that will be competing in Roborodentia, an annual autonomous robot competition. This year the competition involves moving rings from one end of a course to the opposite end of the course.

Automated Solar-Powered Chicken Coop Door, Brenna Yagade

Computer Engineering

The purpose of this project was to plan, design, and build an automated, low power system to open and close a chicken-coop door, which is powered through a solar panel.

M-1: The Mealy Open Source Custom Midi Controller, Garrett Leung, Darren O. Mistica

Electrical Engineering

With the high price of large mixing consoles, aspiring artists are restricted to using a mouse to control digital facsimiles of knobs, faders, switches, and buttons. Though using the software controls is considered a simple task, dedicated hardware allows for tactile, visual, and utility. At a low cost, the heart of the MTech M-1 can be customized and placed into any shell with any combination of controls as possible with the underlying platform.

Modern MIDI controllers require significant physical space due to their preset button layout and space consuming setups. Despite their high price, modern MIDI controllers have only one …

Nutty Adventures, Tony Hsu, Mandy Chan

Computer Engineering

Nutty Adventures is an Android game. The goal is to gather acorns for day-to-day survival, upgrades, and hoarding. Ultimately, the player must have enough acorns by the time Winter comes to fulfill the squirrel’s quest: providing enough acorns for his squirrel kingdom during the barren Winter season. Throughout the days, the player has to keep track of time and monsters, which might influence player decisions.

Using Mobile Cameras To Measure Dye Concentration In Bio-Chemistry Experiments, Jackie Fong, Andrew Lau, Anna Katrina Velasquez

Computer Engineering

Many cutting edge chemistry experiments for high ­throughput assays require measuring colored outputs from specially prepared samples. Absorbance from these samples is usually measured with a specialized piece of equipment that adds to the expense, time, and complexity of obtaining experimental results. To make these experiments more accessible, we looked at developing software to allow cell phones or consumer ­grade USB cameras to measure these experiments and quantify the intensity of the output.

What we have compiled thus far is research regarding several different color spaces and attempted analysis on the many channels of color spaces such as RGB, HSV, …

Skyrim Survival Needs Modification, Sheng-Han Chen

Computer Engineering

A survival needs system implemented within Skyrim's modification framework using Bethesda Softwork's Skyrim Creation Kit.

Slaps Music Sharing App, Maximillian L. Parelius

Computer Engineering

Slaps is a fun way to share new songs with friends. Users can simply select songs from their personal library of music, select a short sample of the song to share, and then select which friends to share it with. If a user loves a song that he/she receives, they can link directly to iTunes through the app to download the full song.

Innovative Connectivity Ensuring Education (I.-C.E.E.), Luke Cole, Andrew Ma, Nicholas Ross, Daniel Williams

Electrical Engineering

This is the critical design review for the Telepresence/Telerobotic Technology for Children with Disabilities Project by team I.- C.E.E. (Innovative Connectivity Ensuring Education). This report details our telepresence system design for our client (Nathan Stilts) including design choices/justification, testing verification and procedures, and chosen components for implementation. There are seven chapters in total starting with introductory/background information followed by hardware and software design, verification, and testing and concludes with the current status of the project and what future work may need to be included.

Wireless Sensor Mesh Network For Irrigation Systems, Rosana Cheruvelil, Oswaldo Garcia, Nabil Haque, Justin Ignacio, Stanley Thomas

Electrical Engineering

Pepper Oak Farms, a company that grows their own olives for olive oil and has approximately 40,000 olive trees, is in need of an efficient way to monitor the soil and atmospheric conditions that are critical to the cultivation of their trees. The company at the moment only has two sensors and has to manually place the sensors at different locations to collect data on soil moisture and temperature. This is expensive, time consuming, and a lot of effort on the owner’s part to go out on the fields to collect this data. As a solution, the company would like …

Creating A 3d Racing Game In Opengl, Noah Harper

Computer Science and Software Engineering

No abstract provided.

Ascendance: A Platformer For Computers, Philip Scott Beauchamp, Joseph Grant Plaster

Computer Science and Software Engineering

Ascendance is a 2.5D platformer adventure game for computers, developed in the Unity development environment over two quarters to apply computer graphics and software engineering principles to the programming and iterative development of a game. Players encounter enemies which they must defeat or avoid while they explore the level for the required objects that lead them to victory. Testing of Ascendance required several iterations of play testing and surveys by various testers with and without gaming backgrounds, and was followed by rapid refinement of game mechanics and aesthetics. The result is a fully functional demo that features a sophisticated start …

Enterprise Smart Outlet: Android Development, Aaron Koeppel

Computer Science and Software Engineering

This project consists of one part of a larger multidisciplinary project, Enterprise Smart Outlet. The purpose of the Enterprise Smart Outlet is to create an electrical outlet which would allow enterprise users to monitor and change their power consumption habits on a large scale. The goal of this project is to allow consumers to see their power consumption per outlet in real time, and then use that information to inform their future habits, helping them conserve electrical energy and money. The Enterprise Smart Outlet Android application provides an interface to display the real time data of all smart outlets connected …

Configuration-Driven Table Library, Torrin Smith

Computer Science and Software Engineering

No abstract provided.

The Ground Is Lava!, Aaron Jacobs

Computer Science and Software Engineering

The Ground Is Lava! is a three dimensional video game written in C++ that uses OpenGL as its graphics API. The game is competitive, with two to four players controlling characters from a first-person perspective. The project implements multiple graphics technologies in order to achieve a consistent, pleasing visual style, including shadow mapping, sky rendering, and procedural animation. The engine built to power the game was developed in a flexible manner, allowing the code to be reused for future projects.

Pier2pier: Final Report, Kevin Nelson, Anthony Miller, Paul Maalouf, Chahan Shah

Mechanical Engineering

No abstract provided.

Telepresence: Design, Implementation And Study Of An Hmd-Controlled Avatar With A Mechatronic Approach, Darren Michael Chan

Master's Theses

Telepresence describes technologies that allow users to remotely experience the sensation of being present at an event without being physically present. An avatar exists to represent the user whilst in a remote location and is tasked to collect stimuli from its immediate surroundings to be delivered to the user for consumption. With the advent of recent developments in Virtual Reality technology, viz., head-mounted displays (HMDs), new possibilities have been enabled in the field of Telepresence. The main focus of this thesis is to develop a solution for visual Telepresence, where an HMD is used to control the direction of a …

Panorama: Multi-Path Ssl Authentication Using Peer Network Perspectives, William P. Harris

Computer Engineering

SSL currently uses certificates signed by Certificate Authorities (CAs) to authenticate connections. e.g. Google will pay a CA to sign a certificate for them, so that they can prove that they're not someone pretending to be Google. Unfortunately, this system has had multiple problems, and many believe that an alternative needs to be found.

One of the ideas for alternatives is using multiple "network perspectives" to authenticate a server. The idea behind this is that, though playing man-in-the-middle (MITM) with one connection is easy, it should be difficult for an adversary to do so with many connections, especially if they …

Cal Poly Application Parking Feature Integration, Ryan Lin

Electrical Engineering

The Cal Poly mobile app provides students, faculty, staff, and visitors of Cal Poly with information pertaining to the campus (such as information about admissions, campus life, campus news, etc.) This project extends the functionality of the Cal Poly app to provide information regarding campus transportation. In particular, this project provides 1. a live twitter feed with announcements about events that may affect the roads and parking spaces on campus 2. an ‘alternative transportation’ points of interest map illustrating the locations of zipcars and electric vehicles charging stations on campus and 3. an easy to use interface to reserve an …

Visualizing Population Density Based On Wifi Router Location And Network Usage, Tyler Deitz

Liberal Arts and Engineering Studies

This research paper introduces a prototype of a feature for Robert E. Kennedy’s maps web application. The feature visualizes population density based off wifi router location and network usage within the building. The significance of the feature is noted by documenting the library’s transition into a hub for student life and campus culture, which increases the space’s occupancy and visitor retention for a longer time. The feature is based off a Voronoi diagram map distribution which strongly affects its technical and visual implementation. The end product is user tested by Cal Poly students and received a 93.5% satisfaction rate.

Synthetic Aperture Radar: Rapid Detection Of Target Motion In Matlab, Daniel S. Kassen

Master's Theses

Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) has come into widespread use in several civilian and military applications. The focus of this paper is the military application of imaging point targets captured by an airborne SAR platform. Using the traditional SAR method of determining target motion by analyzing the difference between subsequent images takes a relatively large amount of processing resources. Using methods in this thesis, target motion can be estimated before even a single image is obtained, reducing the amount of time and power used by a significantly large amount. This thesis builds on work done by Brain Zaharri and David So. …

Grit Mobile: Data Collection App For The Grit Research Project, Ryan Chang

Computer Science and Software Engineering

This project consists of one part of a larger University research project aimed at determining if active learning builds the character trait of grit in students while they learn in the domain of mechanical engineering. The research project has three goals: the development of a mobile app to measure the quantity and quality of active learning, a model of student success using the quantity and quality of active learning, and a characterization of the relationship between active learning and grit growth. This senior project focuses on the mobile app as part of the larger research project. The mobile app will …

Smart Solar Oven, Aaron Gragg

Computer Engineering

Though solar oven technology provides a green and cost effective means of cooking, it is often not adopted because it fails to meet the demands of speed and reliability that are commonplace in our society. This project explores the modification of a traditional box solar to meet these demands by allowing the oven to report temperature to a user’s phone as well as orient itself towards the sun throughout the day.

Music Dynamic Animations, Thuy-Vy Do

Computer Engineering

Audio visualization gives a graphical representation to beats, intensity, and the fluctuating sounds heard in music. Music dynamic animation, deriving from this concept of audio visualizers, implements a hard coded range styled beat detection. This algorithm prioritizes graphical representations of classical and instrumental music. These graphical representations are intended to provide a sense of imagery.

Enhanced Presentation Of Tomographic Data, Carmen Watts Clayton, Bernice E. Mills, George Buffleben, Thien Vu-Nguyen

STAR Program Research Presentations

Solid materials can now be viewed non-destructively with x-rays by tomography; a technique for taking many 2D images of an object at many angles and reconstructing the images into a 3D data cube. The data is next rendered into 2D or 3D still images or movies. By nature, x-ray tomography yields a very large amount of data in three dimensions. Effectively displaying this data to an audience is a challenge.

In this work techniques are explored to improve the presentation methods of movies of both 2D and 3D tomographic data for visual appeal and correct perspective. Finding the optimal ways …

Rapdb: The Rapid Social Application Deployment Service, Lance Tyler, Matthew Morris

Computer Science and Software Engineering

No abstract provided.

Quickbooks Self-Employed Ios Application, Braden Young

Computer Science and Software Engineering

No abstract provided.

Badge Web Application, Ryan Green

Computer Engineering

This project includes the imagining, design, build, and test of a web application that creates and tracks a user’s progress on completing tasks that an administrator has created for the user. The goal of this project is to have a functioning webpage that is robust and scalable to support many users and many tasks. The application will be developed for use on all modern web browsers, and will have a persistent server to access from any platform. This project was designed to be an exercise in building a modern web application, and as such is written using many different languages, …

Examining Ambiguities In The Automatic Packet Reporting System, Kenneth W. Finnegan

Master's Theses

The Automatic Packet Reporting System (APRS) is an amateur radio packet network that has evolved over the last several decades in tandem with, and then arguably beyond, the lifetime of other VHF/UHF amateur packet networks, to the point where it is one of very few packet networks left on the amateur VHF/UHF bands. This is proving to be problematic due to the loss of institutional knowledge as older amateur radio operators who designed and built APRS and other AX.25-based packet networks abandon the hobby or pass away. The purpose of this document is to collect and curate a sufficient body …

Wingtip Dynamics Simulator, Eugene Fox, Nick Rodriguez, Steven Rieber

Mechanical Engineering

Raytheon is a defense contracting company with an electronic warfare division that is developing a radio frequency signal triangulation system. Part of the focus in improving this technology is the need for accurate and real time locational knowledge of the signal receivers, which are located at the tips of aircraft wings. Due to turbulence during flight, the fluttering motion of the wings alter the distance and angle relationships of the two receivers and add noise to the received signal data, which negatively affect the triangulation estimates. To mitigate this error caused by the wing flutter, Raytheon is developing a software …

Wirelessly Controlled Smart Outlet, Andrew Godsil, Ariel Dubinsky

Electrical Engineering

Popularity of home automation devices has increased greatly in recent years due to higher affordability and simplicity through smartphone and tablet connectivity. For the purpose of this experiment, we have developed the Smart Outlet: a stand-alone communication unit, used to connect home outlets to the internet. The Smart Outlet controls lighting and simple appliances throughout the home, remotely, using wireless commands from the web. A Google Calendar interface directly controls the outlets’ function by scheduling them with dedicated calendar events. The calendar’s interface can even be accessed from multiple different platforms (i.e. phones, computers, tablets) for the convenience of all …