Computer Engineering Commons^™

Polysaber: A Custom Reactive Lightsaber Soundboard, Pedro B. Medeiros

Computer Engineering

The PolySaber project was developed as a custom reactive lightsaber control system built as a fully custom PCB design. The purpose of the project was to create a lower-cost and more customizable alternative to commercially available lightsaber soundboards while simultaneously providing hands-on experience in PCB design, embedded systems development, and hardware integration. Commercial lightsaber soundboards are expensive, proprietary, and difficult for hobbyists to customize. The PolySaber project addresses this by creating a modifiable hardware platform built around the ESP32 microcontroller. The system supports programmable firmware, RGB NeoPixel blade control, motion sensing, reactive swing and clash effects, onboard audio amplification, and …

Stretch Web Teleoperation Keyboard Final Report, Aaron Chou, Francisco Irazaba

Computer Engineering

This project added keyboard controls to the Hello Robot Stretch Web Teleop interface. The goal was to make the robot easier to control from a web browser without needing a gamepad or separate terminal-based keyboard program. The new interface allows users to control different parts of the robot with customizable key bindings.

Spy Bot, Nathanael Bruce Farris

Computer Engineering

This project set out to develop a compact, mobile-controlled robotic platform designed for remote video surveillance and control via a smartphone. Using a Raspberry Pi as the core controller, the robot integrates a Flask-based server, HTML/JavaScript-based user interface, and an infrared-capable camera to provide real-time video streaming and directional control through a web browser. Key design challenges included managing power delivery, integrating motor control with live video, and modernizing web technologies to ensure smooth communication between client and server. The final system demonstrates a responsive and portable proof of concept that highlights the potential for future upgrades, such as night …

Custom Data Acquisition System For The Cal Poly Racing Baja Team, Joe Keenan

Computer Engineering

The Cal Poly Racing Baja team relies on data to analyze and improve upon various vehicle systems in an off-road style vehicle. In order to accomplish this, some data logging or data acquisition (DAQ) is required to collect the data. This project explores the use of a controller area network with flexible data rate (CAN FD) bus along with a custom file format to store data on an SD card that can be made easily acceptable to engineers on the team.

Open-Source Cubesat Flight Software And Simulation, James Gruber

Computer Engineering

An open-source FreeRTOS-based flight software framework for CubeSats, with an example flight software package and simulation demonstrating real-time attitude control.

Simulated Live Studio Audience, Theodore David Shellenberger

Computer Engineering

The Simulated Live Studio Audience is a Python based application that utilizes Vosk, Roboflow, and Llama 3.2 to provide a user with auditory feedback based upon both visual and audible input from their device's microphone and camera. This system functions with a custom trained computer vision model to detect a specified object and when individuals walk in and out of the camera frame, outputting sitcom style simulated crowd reaction sounds accordingly. The simulated studio audience program also takes in vocal input from users, converts it to text, and, using a large language model, analyzes it for content that can be …

Custom Led Dashboard Integration For The Cal Poly Racing Team, Josue Hernandez

Computer Engineering

The Custom LED Dashboard Integration was made for the Cal Poly Racing Team, specifically the BAJA division. The dashboard was made as a way to combat the current limitations endured from the past methods used to display critical information of the vehicle to the car. The display was made to combat issues of limited quantity of data being able to be displayed to the driver and its small readability was an issue, the display helped combat that by providing a greater quantity of data being able to be sent and displayed on the display and the information being displayed having …

Ocean Sight One: Mixed Reality Experience, Lucas Michael Reyna

Computer Engineering

Ocean Sight One is an interdisciplinary project group consisting of Cal Poly staff and students from several different departments. It exists to educate the public on the marine ecosystems near the Santa Barbara coastline that is the home of twenty-three abandoned oil rigs. Despite one’s initial reaction to these massive abandoned structures, they actually provide an incredibly diverse dwelling for numerous forms of sea life. The site is a shining beacon for marine ecology researchers trying to formulate how to preserve wildlife in an era of worsening global environmental disruptions. The future of these oil rigs are not certain, as …

Polyflowbuilder: An Intuitive Tool For Academic Planning At Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, Duncan Thomas Applegarth

Computer Engineering

PolyFlowBuilder is a web application that lets users create visually intuitive flowcharts to aid in academic planning at Cal Poly. These flowcharts can be customized in a variety of ways to accurately represent complex academic plans, such as double majors, minors, taking courses out- of-order, etc. The original version of PolyFlowBuilder, released Summer 2020, was not written for continued expansion and growth. Therefore, a complete rewrite was determined to be necessary to enable the project to grow in the future. This report details the process to completely rewrite the existing version of PolyFlowBuilder over the course of six months, using …

Wonder World, Liam M. Shaw, Briana Kuo

Computer Engineering

The main motivation for this project stems from a mutual lifelong love for video games, specifically sandbox games. These types of games, such as Mojang's Minecraft, ConcernedApe's Stardew Valley, and many more, have consistently provided us comfort in stressful times throughout our lives. Now, at the culmination of our undergraduate experience, the curriculum we have experienced throughout these past four years has provided us with the knowledge and resources that allows us to provide this same sense of comfort for others. Our game aims to encourage collaboration between two players through solving puzzles and minigames. In addition, our game seeks …

Phone Microwave, Khanh Kim Hoang, Emily Zhou

Computer Engineering

This project involves the installation of remote-control capabilities in an antique 1980s microwave, effectively turning the microwave into a “smart” device. While preserving the original functionality of the microwave, a combination of software and hardware components allows for remote microwave operations. The microwave can be remotely operated by calling the built-in number, and more advanced settings and options can be utilized by texting. The microwave is also secured against unauthorized use with the addition of a PIN code that is required to operate the device.

Barrier Knockdown Test Control System For The Cal Poly Kinesiology Department, Regina M. Chapuis

Computer Engineering

The goal of this project is to design and implement a new control system for the LEDs and buttons on an existing Barrier Knockdown setup in the Cal Poly Kinesiology department. The Barrier Knockdown test is a testing apparatus in which subjects knock down a series of mechanical barriers in one of three patterns. The computer system times their reaction and movement time, and the test as a whole provides students with data to study the phenomenon of Contextual Interference. This system was previously controlled by an old computer setup that ultimately crashed. This project recreates the logic and user …

The Poly Rover Project, Eric Lei, Alla Alamsi, Neil Patel, Diego Ramos

Computer Engineering

The Polyver Project is an idea born from the curiosity of a few students who wondered what the interaction between a physical person and a rover as the host of random internet users would look like. It is also an experiment to enhance the exploration of real world sites in real time while also having the power of interaction.

The goal of the Polyver Project is to build the foundation for a system that can serve as the interface between the internet and a fleet of rovers. Each rover is equipped with at least a camera, microphone, and a speaker …

Dual-Axis Precision Imager, Gary Huarng

Computer Engineering

The Dual-Axis Precision Imager (DAPI) is a drawing robot that processes images and draws them on a whiteboard. The system has two modes: a Sobel filter mode that finds the edges of the input image with a Sobel filter, and a tri-tone grayscale mode that approximates the shading of the input image with the colors white, gray, and black. The DAPI consists of an Arduino-controlled XY gantry system with a pen mounted on the gantry head, and a Processing IDE program that processes the original image, converts the processed image into gantry instructions, and sends them to the Arduino for …

Mars Prototype Rover Environmental Measurement System, James A. Renick

Computer Engineering

In my senior project, the problem I am trying to solve is how to efficiently design, create, and install an original library onto a Mars prototype rover operating system and to further use that library to integrate a new weather measurement sensor device into the rover system with the necessary software and hardware implementations. This is an important and highly valued problem as many aerospace and other engineering companies utilize rovers and other autonomous systems for important research, explorations, and reconnaissance missions and goals. In solving this problem, I utilized many resources that were available to me such as advisors, …

Researching The Impact Of Cal Poly Classes On Computing Students Perceptions Of Computer Ethics And Social Responsibility, Annie Joss

Computer Engineering

The importance and impact of socio-technical systems are playing an increasing role in the education of computing students. Discussion of ethics and social responsibility has always been a tenant of computer science education; however, research has shown engineering and computer science students lose focus on these values over their engineering education. Cal Poly computing departments have taken steps to emphasize social responsibility and ethics through required and suggested courses. This project focuses on examining the values and beliefs of Cal Poly computing students, who were surveyed over Winter and Spring Quarters in 2022. This project is inspired by Dr. Cech’s …

Developing A Miniature Smart Boat For Marine Research, Michael Isaac Eirinberg

Computer Engineering

This project examines the development of a smart boat which could serve as a possible marine research apparatus. The smart boat consists of a miniature vessel containing a low-cost microcontroller to live stream a camera feed, GPS telemetry, and compass data through its own WiFi access point. The smart boat also has the potential for autonomous navigation. My project captivated the interest of several members of California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo’s (Cal Poly SLO) Marine Science Department faculty, who proposed a variety of fascinating and valuable smart boat applications.

Digital Forensics Range, Cody P. Shanahan, Bryson Y. Shishido, Samuel R. Mckee, Justin Siu, Lisa Li, Maxwell Brewer

Computer Engineering

The Digital Forensics Range was developed to serve as an online training for groups interested in computer forensics. This year's team had the goal to expand upon last year, by adding a new forensics image, unity scenario, and additional AWS functionality. The team still wanted to continue with last year's goals of keeping the training easily runnable, quickly deployable, and rapidly scalable through the use of the cloud. Adding to last year's work, this year's team hoped to further increase the educational value of the simulation with more practice, and the addition of feedback. The training is meant to be …

Pier Ocean Pier, Brandon J. Nowak

Computer Engineering

Pier Ocean Peer is a weatherproof box containing a Jetson Nano, connected to a cell modem and camera, and powered by a Lithium Iron Phosphate battery charged by a 50W solar panel. This system can currently provide photos to monitor the harbor seal population that likes to haul out at the base of the Cal Poly Pier, but more importantly it provides a platform for future expansion by other students either though adding new sensors directly to the Jetson Nano or by connecting to the jetson nano remotely through a wireless protocol of their choice.

Otter Vector Extension, Alexis A. Peralta

Computer Engineering

This paper offers an implementation of a subset of the "RISC-V 'V' Vector Extension", v0.7.x. The "RISC-V 'V' Vector Extension" is the proposed vector instruction set for RISC-V open-source architecture. Vectors are inherently data-parallel, allowing for significant performance increases. Vectors have applications in fields such as cryptography, graphics, and machine learning. A vector processing unit was added to Cal Poly's RISC-V multi-cycle architecture, known as the OTTER. Computationally intensive programs running on the OTTER Vector Extension ran over three times faster when compared to the baseline multi-cycle implementation. Memory intensive applications saw similar performance increases.

Fitness Plug, Evan Lee Ashley

Computer Engineering

My parents only allowed me to play videogames or watch television for a certain number of minutes or hours per day. By limiting screen time, they encouraged me to be active and find other things to do outside of television or videogames. The Fitness Plug aims to do both by converting time exercised to entertainment time; you can only watch television or play videogames for as long as you have exercised.

Robust Drone Landing, Alvin Xuan Quan Chui

Computer Engineering

The growth of drone technology goes with the demands of computer vision. Computer vision provides opportunities for developers to design and create, giving rise to a new innovation. It is also a basis for a full autonomous system when implemented with an intelligent agent. Surveillance drones are installed with cameras, and cameras are the most common approach to computer vision. However, a high-resolution camera with great performance could be expensive, while other low-cost cameras might lack reading accuracy. To improve the performances and maximize a camera’s capability, many different object trackers come into play. This paper will investigate and study …

Wine Sampler, Lance L. Litten

Computer Engineering

Quality testing is an important part of the wine industry. Without proper quality control, thousands of dollars could be wasted on bottling and recalling hundreds of gallons of wine. Due to this, labs are set up that collect wine samples from the tanks in a wine production plant and test them. A big part of this testing is determining exactly what tanks need to be tested and what tanks are at risk. My project aims to help automate this task by collecting data from the tanks wirelessly and keeping track of simple indicators such as pH and temperature. Automating this …

Rchex: A Radio-Controlled Hexapod, Dominique Sayo

Computer Engineering

rcHex is a radio-controlled hexapod with 18 degrees of freedom, capable of positional and rotational body adjustment as well as omnidirectional travel at variable speeds using three common gaits. Its general-purpose design accessible to hobbyists makes rcHex an platform for further development, whether it be experimentation in advanced robotic movement or retrofitting sensors to utilize technologies such as computer vision and artificial intelligence. This report explores some of the design intricacies of hexapod movement, including gait sequencing and the application of inverse kinematics to multi-jointed limbs.

Autonomous Butter Robot, David Chau, Michael Hegglin

Computer Engineering

Don’t you wish your butter would come to you? Well now it can with the patented Michael and David butter robot! Based on an idea from a TV show, our team set out to see if a similar robot was possible to make in real life. The objective was simple. Can we make a small table sized robot that can bring a person butter using image detection software? With that question in mind we set out buying our components. We wanted to keep it small, so we looked up devices that could do simple image processing and from there we …

Otter Debugger, Keefe Johnson

Computer Engineering

This project is a debugger and programmer for the OTTER CPU, the implementation of the RISC-V ISA used by Cal Poly to teach computer architecture and assembly language in CPE 233/333 and usually implemented on the Basys3 FPGA development board. With this tool, students can quickly program their OTTER with a new/revised RISC-V program binary without resynthesizing the entire FPGA design. They can then use the debugger from a PC to pause/continue/single-step execution and set breakpoints, while inspecting and modifying register and memory contents. This enables real-time debugging of OTTER projects involving custom hardware such as a keyboard and VGA …

Room Management Web Application And Movement And Temperature Sensors, Visalbotr Chan, Huy Anh Duong

Computer Engineering

There are three main parts of this system: micro-controller, database, and website. Micro-controller detects motion of people walking in and out and It also measures room temperature and humidity in a confined space then updates collected data to the database. Our system’s database contains 6 main columns: room number, room capacity, number of students, temperature in Celsius, humidity in percent and date created. Finally, this database is queried by the website to display the information on the webpage. Users could also navigate on our site to check the most and least occupy rooms, and they can also search for a …

Tiny Disco: A Cost-Effective, High-Fidelity Wireless Audio System, Luke Martin Liberatore

Computer Engineering

The Tiny Disco is a WiFi based concert system, featuring improvements on popular “Silent Disco” concerts. Rather than being tied to compression and bandwidth restrictions present in traditional silent disco systems, the Tiny Disco system can deliver 320kbps+ audio quality, and allows listeners to bring their own headphones, further lending to the high quality audio experience.

Tiny Disco uses a Raspberry Pi as the audio server, and Espressif ESP32 microcontrollers as audio receivers/clients. The Tiny Disco is primarily geared toward smaller concerts and niche events where audio quality is valued, though due to its WiFi-based architecture, it can be expanded …

Reasoning From Point Clouds, Joey Wilson

Computer Engineering

Over the past two years, 3D object detection has been a major area of focus across industry and academia. This is primarily due to the difficulty of learning data from point clouds. While camera images are fixed size and can therefore be easily trained on using convolution, point clouds are unstructured series of points in three dimensions. Therefore, there is no fixed number of features, or a structure to run convolution on. Instead, researchers have developed many ways of attempting to learn from this data, however there is no clear consensus on what is the best method, as each has …

Keylime, Matthew Orgill

Computer Engineering

This project creates an iOS mobile app geared specifically toward the students of California Polytechnic State University. The app aims to provide the ability for users to discover new restaurants to checkout in the central coast area. These restaurants can be filtered to the user’s choosing based on the price of food, rating the restaurant has received, distance away from the user, and type of food. In addition, featured deals that local restaurants currently offer can be found on the app. Each restaurant can be favorited by the user to allow for better filtering of discovering new restaurants and to …