Computer Engineering Commons^™

Implementation Of Traditional Printing Techniques For The Development Of Flexible Printed Sensors, Sai Guruva Reddy Avuthu

Dissertations

Printed electronics has gained a remarkable interest over the past decade for the fabrication of cost efficient electronic devices, with a major focus on the development of flexible sensors. This dissertation focuses on the fabrication of flexible sensors using traditional printing processes such as screen, inkjet and gravure printing.

A flexible organic thin film transistor (OTFT) was successfully fabricated on a polyethylene terephthalate (PET) substrate and employed as a humidity sensor. Aluminum gate electrode was thermally evaporated on PET and UV clear dielectric layer was spin coated. Source and drain silver interdigitated electrodes were screen printed. 6,13-bis(triisopropylsilylethynyl) pentacene, a humidity …

Exploration Of Stimulus Current Energy Reduction And Bifurcation Dynamics In Conductance-Based Neuron Models Using Optimal Control Theory, Michael E. Ellinger

Dissertations

Hodgkin-Huxley type conductance-based models can simulate the effect of time-varying injected stimulus currents on the neuron membrane voltage. The dynamics simulated by these model types enables investigation of the biophysical basis of neuronal activity which is fundamental to higher level function. Broadened understanding the basis of nervous system function could lead to development of effective treatment for related diseases, disorders, and the effects of trauma. In this dissertation, optimal control is used with conductance-based neuron models to develop a "Reduced Energy Input Stimulus Discovery Method." Within the method, an objective function balances two competing criteria: tracking a reference membrane voltage …

Project Llama: Making A Cappella Arranging Easier, Jason Lu

Liberal Arts and Engineering Studies

This project was intended to improve the current state of a cappella arranging. It explains the problems with current tools and explores other options.

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 …

Antics: A Cross-Platform Mobile Game, Gerren D. Willis

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

Recent technologies have made it increasingly easier for independent developers to build and deploy gaming applications for mobile devices. The focus of this master's project is to investigate one such set of technologies, which include Adobe AIR, Starling and Feathers, that allow games to be written in ActionScript and run on both Android and iOS devices. For this purpose, I chose to use these technologies to design and implement the game ANTics proposed by Whim Independent Studios, a start up game studio in San Bernardino. ANTics is written in ActionScript and runs on Adobe AIR. It can be deployed on …

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 …

Performance Analysis Of Distance Relay On Shunt/Series Facts-Compensated Transmission Line, Ahmed Kareem Lafta Al-Behadili

Masters Theses

Flexible Alternating Current Transmission Systems (FACTS) are increasingly being used to enhance the efficiency and reliability of power system networks. FACTS devices can influence the performance of existing protective system components (specifically distance relays) due to the fact that FACTS change power system quantities such as line impedances, voltages, and currents. Distance relay may mal-operate when FACTS devices are connected since they cause some of the tripping characteristics to change. This thesis investigates the impact on distance relay performance due to compensations using two types of FACTS controllers: Static Synchronous Compensator (STATCOM) and Static Synchronous Series Compensator (SSSC). Analytical study …

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.

Improving Automatic Name-Face Association Using Celebrity Images On The Web, Zhineng Chen, Bailan Feng, Chong-Wah Ngo, Caiyan Jia, Xiangsheng Huang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper investigates the task of automatically associating faces appearing in images (or videos) with their names. Our novelty lies in the use of celebrity Web images to facilitate the task. Specifically, we first propose a method named Image Matching (IM), which uses the faces in images returned from name queries over an image search engine as the gallery set of the names, and a probe face is classified as one of the names, or none of them, according to their matching scores and compatibility characterized by a proposed Assigning-Thresholding (AT) pipeline. Noting IM could provide guidance for association for …

Relating The Experimental Ionization Coefficients In Semiconductors To The Nonlocal Ionization Coefficients, Jeng Shiuh Cheong, Majeed M. Hayat, Xinxin Zhou, John P.R. David

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research and Publications

The experimentally determined impact ionization coefficients, , include intrinsically the presence of a dead-space, where carriers cannot impact ionize as they do not have sufficient energy. These, therefore, cannot be used by nonlocal ionization models, which require the enabled ionization coefficients, which describe the ionization probability after the dead-space. A relatively simple relationship is shown to exist between α'(β') and , which requires only the knowledge of the carrier threshold energies. This allows conventionally limited to the local model framework, to be used to give a very good prediction of the avalanche multiplication and excess noise for a wide range …

Investigation Of The Surface Adhesion Phenomena And Mechanism Of Gold-Plated Contacts At Superlow Making/Breaking Speed, Wanbin Ren, Cheng Chang, Yu Chen, Shengjun Xue, Ronald A. Coutu Jr.

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research and Publications

Surface adhesion phenomena of gold-plated copper contact materials are studied in conditions of nonarc load (5/15/25 V and 0.2/0.5/1 A) and superlow speed (25 and 50 nm/s) realized by a piezoactuator during the making and breaking processes. It is shown that softening and melting of local asperities leads to interface adhesion, which results from the joule heat generated by the contact resistance; it is determined that the change of contact force with time obeys the negative exponential distribution and the time constant is associated with the adhesion force directly. Based on the fitting experimental data, the relationship between the adhesion …

System Design And Performance Analysis Of Asymmetrically And Symmetrically Clipped Optical (Asco)-Ofdm For Im/Dd Optical Wireless Communications, Nan Wu

Dissertations

As the quantity of mobile communication devices, such as cellphones, tablets, and laptops, dramatically increase, the demand for high speed wireless service has been growing. Optical wireless communications (OWCs), which offer unlimited transmission bandwidth, have received a lot of attention and been studied in recent decades. They can be an effective alternative to radio frequency communications (RFCs) for indoor high speed data transmission. Intensity modulation direct detection (IM/DD) is a simple way to realize the transmission of optical wireless signals in an indoor environment. Information data streams are modulated into the intensity of optical carriers and transmitted by light emitting …

Retropie Gaming System, Micah Mckittrick

Symposium Of University Research and Creative Expression (SOURCE)

The purpose of this project is to build a gaming emulator using a Raspberry Pi Model B to emulate the video game systems Nintendo, Super Nintendo, Sega, and Atari 2600. In order to interact with the emulators the following peripherals have been wired in: one 8-way directional arcade style joystick, ten concave arcade style buttons with micro switches, two universal serial bus (USB) powered speakers, one 15.6 inch high definition television, and one USB powered hub. The buttons and joystick will be wired to the Raspberry Pi’s GPIO pins. Code will be obtained from an outside source and, then, modified …

Touchscreen Coding: Reversi, Andrew Walker

Symposium Of University Research and Creative Expression (SOURCE)

The purpose of the project is to run a touchscreen application on a 32-bit microcontroller. Reversi was chosen as the application to be developed for the project because it is a rules-light board game that requires a small amount of graphical resources, and it can be used to test the display of images and correlation to where the screen is touched and how the program responds by changing the display. The primary objectives include implementing the device libraries and drivers for the chosen microcontroller and display, getting the application to display the correct image in the correct place, and detecting …