Computer Engineering Commons^™

Feedback Stabilization At Spear3, Daniel Kelley, Jeff Corbett

STAR Program Research Presentations

The SPEAR3 synchrotron lightsource at SLAC relies on a sophisticated radio frequency (RF) timing system to maintain current – electrons – in the storage ring. One problem SPEAR3 operators have dealt with is the thermal expansion of one of the cables supporting this RF timing system. As the cable expands and contracts with the diurnal rise and fall of the sun, the phase of the RF in the cable shifts. This shifting phase affects the timing accuracy of electron injections into the storage ring.

A common feedback control algorithm PID (Proportional Integral Derivative) has countless applications in engineering. PID feedback …

Smarter Neat Nets, Ryan Swords Dehaven

Master's Theses

This paper discusses a modification to improve usability and functionality of a ge- netic neural net algorithm called NEAT (NeuroEvolution of Augmenting Topolo- gies). The modification aims to accomplish its goal by automatically changing parameters used by the algorithm with little input from a user. The advan- tage of the modification is to reduce the guesswork needed to setup a successful experiment with NEAT that produces a usable Artificial Intelligence (AI). The modified algorithm is tested against the unmodified NEAT with several different setups and the results are discussed. The algorithm shows strengths in some areas but can increase the …

Smartpark, David Cosgrove

Computer Engineering

No abstract provided.

Bruno The Robotic Bear, Aaron Brauner, Ian Panzer

Computer Engineering

Creating homemade robots are becoming a popular hobby among engineers. With the dramatic reduction in costs over the past few decades, it is finally possible to build a personal automated mailbox. Microcontrollers needed to function as the brains of the robot are also becoming powerful enough that relatively complicated instructions could be programmed into the robot to handle a plethora of sensors and peripherals. In order to demonstrate how the Computer Engineering department models the synthesis of computer science and electrical engineering, the topic chosen was robotics, specifically, a stuffed bear robot.

The microcontroller chosen was the Arduino Mega 2560 …

Tmc Simulator, Stuart Heater

Computer Science and Software Engineering

The goal of this project was to design and implement a graphical user interface which simulates TriTech's VisiCad Inform computer- aided dispatch well enough for trainees to learn how to efficiently and accurately use the software in a risk-free environment. The simulator should also allow the training proctor to actively create new incidents during training in order to ensure that the trainees are able to respond properly. The structure of this project allowed me to work with both more- and less-experienced programmers, particularly those who are far more experienced with networking and hardware than myself. It was my first time …

Insight - A Virtual Reality, Svyatoslav Markeyev, Brian Spence

Computer Engineering

This is a project about extending the capabilities of current consumer virtual reality systems. The goal of the project was to extend the capabilities of the Oculus Rift Headset in order to create a system which would allow a user to explore a virtual environment in an immersive way just as they would explore reality. The system created would allow a user to explore a virtual environment by walking around in a familiar immersive manner. This was accomplished using the Unreal Development Kit, a state of the art GPS system, and industry proven IMU. The user’s movements are tracked as …

Dynamic Paint For Maya: Creation And Use In The Animation Short "Color Clash", Christopher Wallis

Computer Science and Software Engineering

This write-up describes the creation and utilization of a paint effect from both the perspective of the programmer and the animator. The paint effect simulates a 2D fluid using the algorithm described in Jos Stam's ``Real-time Fluid Dynamics for Games'' \cite{stam}, bakes the results into an image sequence, and then wraps the sequence around a 3D mesh. The second half of this paper describes how the effect was integrated into the animation short, ``Color Clash'' and the animation pipeline that was used.

Hid Rw300/Rw400 Hardware Implementation Vulnerabilities And Mitigation Strategies, Taylor Nelson

Computer Science and Software Engineering

The HID RW300/RW400 readers are in use and deployed in buildings around the world. Designed for industrial/commercial facilities security requirements you can find them outside biotech companies (AMGEN), educational institutions (Cal Poly San Luis Obispo), and doctors offices. In a 2010 paper entitled “Heart of Darkness - exploring the uncharted backwaters of HID iCLASSTM security” by Milosch Meriac numerous vulnerabilities were outlined. Despite this research HID continues to sell these readers to consumers.

To properly protect the safety of individuals and assets these HID devices are no longer adequate. I have verified that these attacks are feasible by a moderately …

Ticketcloud, Ross Mckelvie

Computer Science and Software Engineering

TicketCloud is a digital ticket service that offers advantages to both event hosts/vendors and consumers. Using QR Codes, RESTful cloud APIs, and mobile devices TicketCloud takes an outdated market digital and opens up new methods of transacting, allowing customers to resell tickets from their couch and for vendors to reap the benefits of these transactions.

High Voltage Waveform Sensor, Nathan Stump

Computer Engineering

The purpose of this project was to build a system to measure the voltage waveform of a discharging railgun. Another group of students had built a railgun system to simulate micro asteroid impacts in low Earth orbit. The only instrumentation available to them was an analog voltmeter attached to the capacitor banks. During the lengthy (30 to 45 minute) charging process, an analog voltmeter was more than capable of measuring the voltage. However, during the discharging process the time elapsed was so short (approximately one millisecond) that waveform data could not be captured. In order to measure power dissipation during …

Inform 7 Usability Precompiler, Chad Robert Brantley, Timothy Phan

Computer Engineering

Inform 7 Usability Precompiler or I7UP is a project which helps Inform 7 authors with their stories by diversifying the possibilities in the author’s interactive fiction. I7UP reads and analyzes the Inform story that is passed in through python and natural language processing then provides the user with a selection of choices to add to his story and lastly automatically generates the corresponding Inform 7 code. By utilizing the combination of Python, Django, and HTML/CSS, I7UP is able to provide an easytouse interface which helps generate additional "Understand" statements and "Conjugated Verb" statements. I7UP is an authoring aid for Inform …

Automatic Text Analysis Using Drupal, Herman Chai

Computer Engineering

Natural language processing (NLP) is a field of computer science that is concerned with the interpretation of human language by computers. NLP has a multitude of different applications in the fields of computer science, artificial intelligence, and linguistics. The Automatic Text Analysis Using Drupal project is intended to increase the availability of NLP tools that can be easily used by the general public. By integrating a front-end content management system like Drupal with different back-end NLP applications, users can receive automatic analysis of their text without knowledge of the system.

Real Time Rendering Engine, Kevin Ubay-Ubay

Computer Engineering

Entertaining and playable content in computer graphics requires real time rendering. Real time rendering essentially demands that frames need to be rendered within milliseconds in order to deliver an interactive experience for the client. Video games are an example of such a medium that needs real time rendering. Without frame rates in the realm of real time, video games cannot deliver an enjoyable experience. Behind virtually every video game is an engine. The architecture of video game engines usually comprises of sub engines that are specifically designed to handle physics, audio, user input and rendering. The purpose of this project …

Set-Top Box Simulator, Philip Tyler

Computer Engineering

This report presents a python-based Set-top box simulation program utilizing a Simulation library called SimPy (See Appendix 1) to simulate real-time operation of a Set-top Box, or DVR. A graphical user interface, designed with PyQt4, allows a user to customize many simulation parameters such as hard drive speeds, buffer sizes, length of simulation, etc. The GUI also shows the user any errors that occur during the simulation such as buffer overflows/underflows. The results of this simulator lie within 85%-95% accuracy depending on the user-input parameters. With this simulation program, a Set-top box hardware or firmware developer can interchange the scheduling …

Human Powered Vehicle Bike Computer, Eric Yaklin, Bradley Shellnut

Computer Engineering

This project is a bike computer system built for Cal Poly’s Human Powered Vehicle Team. It was designed and built using Arduino and Android programming tools. The project consists of an Arduino Uno used to collect bike data (such as speed, temperature and GPS location) and an Android Application used to display this data in real time and save it to user profiles within the application. Although many bike computers already exist, this project was specifically designed to be used in a team racing environment rather than for individual use.

Programming Tools For Artificial Intelligence Classes, Christopher Mckee

Computer Engineering

This project was begun in Winter of 2013 at California Polytechnic State University by myself, Christopher McKee, and was advised by Foaad Khosmood. The main goal of this project was to create an alternative to a current program that was being used in the Artificial Intelligence course on campus. The previous program used Java to create a Graphical User Interface (GUI) for students to use when learning how to create the various intelligent agents. In the versions created within the scope of this project, one of the environments used Java as the programming language, while the other two environments leveraged …

Channels: Easy Video Content Consumption, Alexander R. Ledwith

Computer Engineering

The idea for this project is to take a user’s digital movie and television show library, and organize the individual videos into lists that will continuously and concurrently play like cable TV channels. This means that when a list of channels is switched to, video content will automatically start playing, possibly in the middle, based on a schedule. It should serve the needs of the user by allowing the user to quickly watch any of their existing channels, easily add a new channel based on chosen criteria or manual selection, and easily add new video content. In addition, the product …

Fit For Green Online Notification And Reporting System, Alexander Spotnitz

Computer Engineering

Fit for Green seeks to combat two main threats on the American home front: obesity and the energy crisis. This project is an online Notification & Reporting System that allows gym administrators using the Fit for Green solutions the ability to instantly generate reports and have those reports emailed to them on a scheduled (daily or weekly) basis. The reports contain metrics pertinent to the gym (e.g. one metric may be Average Power Generated per Workout Session).

Pier Portal Project Ii, Andy Lam, Brian Markwart

Computer Engineering

The goal of this project is to design and build a remotely controllable camera system that will be deployed at the Cal Poly Pier located in Avila Beach. The system is composed of a camera and all of its lighting and movement controlling hardware enclosed into a waterproof acrylic tube, allowing it to be lowered underwater. The camera will stream its video feed onto a website where any user will be able to watch a live video stream from the pod. In addition, users with the correct privileges will be able to remotely control of the camera system via the …

Motion Sensing Fifa Controller, Anthony Agius, Jake Troychak

Computer Engineering

Our Project is designed to control the XBOX 360 video game FIFA Soccer by different kicking motions made by the user. This system consists of two pieces: the microcontroller attached to the XBOX 360 controller and the foot piece that is attached to the users foot in order to read all of the movements needed to control the game. Our project brings the soccer game to life by forcing the users to actually perform the different kicking motions that they want their game avatar to copy on the game. This project was designed for those who want to be more …

Pictshare, Josh Beeston, Eddie Bell

Computer Engineering

No abstract provided.

Protocases, Christopher M. Polis

Computer Engineering

Design and implementation of a 3D printing web application.

Aurora: Experience Music Like Never Before, Jason Dreisbach

Computer Engineering

Choreographing musical light shows has previously required expensive professional equipment and experienced personnel. A Mac application, Aurora, was developed to control Phillips Hue Light LED light bulbs to emulate the effects of more complex professional lighting systems. Aurora makes it possible to choreograph dazzling lighting effects to musical tracks.

Paris: A Parallel Rsa-Prime Inspection Tool, Joseph R. White

Master's Theses

Modern-day computer security relies heavily on cryptography as a means to protect the data that we have become increasingly reliant on. As the Internet becomes more ubiquitous, methods of security must be better than ever. Validation tools can be leveraged to help increase our confidence and accountability for methods we employ to secure our systems.

Security validation, however, can be difficult and time-consuming. As our computational ability increases, calculations that were once considered “hard” due to length of computation, can now be done in minutes. We are constantly increasing the size of our keys and attempting to make computations harder …

Cuda Enhanced Filtering In A Pipelined Video Processing Framework, Austin Aaron Dworaczyk Wiltshire

Master's Theses

The processing of digital video has long been a significant computational task for modern x86 processors. With every video frame composed of one to three planes, each consisting of a two-dimensional array of pixel data, and a video clip comprising of thousands of such frames, the sheer volume of data is significant. With the introduction of new high definition video formats such as 4K or stereoscopic 3D, the volume of uncompressed frame data is growing ever larger.

Modern CPUs offer performance enhancements for processing digital video through SIMD instructions such as SSE2 or AVX. However, even with these instruction sets, …

More Like This, Geoffrey Lawson

Computer Science and Software Engineering

No abstract provided.

Wargps: An Android Game That Incorporates Gps Location Services, David Nussbaum

Computer Engineering

As the future of computing moves from the traditional personal computer to that of devices in the mobile realm, the mobile device becomes a more important part of our lives. Since the release of the first iPhone in 2007, mobile devices have become heavily adopted. The adoption rate at which both Android and iOS device have been adopted among users has out-paced the adoption rate of the PC revolution from the 1980s and the Internet boom from the 1990s.6 Within the smart phone market, adoption of Android smartphones is increasing six times faster than iPhone adoption.8 In the spans of …

Motohud: Intelligent And Safe Navigational Data Presentation For Motorcyclists, Drew Bentz, William Budney

Computer Engineering

The system uses a GPS (Global Positioning System) sensor, Bluetooth modem, and OLED (organic light-emitting diode) screen to display navigational information to a motorcycle rider. Currently supported navigational information are speed and heading, with a framework in place for future turn-by-turn navigation. The system is powered by a lithium-ion battery pack and controlled by an Arduino Micro. For turn-by-turn navigation, an Android powered smartphone running our Android App is required. Our system aims to reduce safety hazards from having to tilt or move one’s head when trying to view speed on a motorcycle speedometer, which is usually mounted down by …

Growing Grounds Inventory Application, Courtney Schenkl

Computer Engineering

No abstract provided.

Design Of An Energy Efficient Virtual End Node Client Using Openadr2.0a And Smap, Kevin Navero

BioResource and Agricultural Engineering

Demand Response (DR) describes the set of actions taken to impose a reduction in electrical loads to stabilize the power grid and decrease costs. It is used when power grid emergencies or extremely high demand and congestion, threaten the electricity supply-demand balance. Automated Demand Response (ADR) describes a web-based control system that triggers DR events automatically by signaling other pre-programmed control systems. This project intends to use the OpenADR2.0 specifications provided by the OpenADR Alliance to construct an open source Virtual End Node (VEN) client to retrieve DR signals. The Simple Measurement and Actuation Profile (sMAP) software is also used …