Computer Engineering Commons^™

Pet Food Monitor Using The Raspberry Pi, Kimberly Aguero

Computer Engineering

Computer system built on a Raspberry Pi that will monitor the levels of food in a pet food bowl. If it detects that there is no food in the bowl, it will notify the user via email or text.

Sun Watch 3.0, Eli Backer

Computer Engineering

The Sun Watch was a part of Eli Backer's portfolio in applying to Masters of Fine Art programs around the country. It is a typical-looking wristwatch that does not give the time, but the position of the sun in the sky via a row of LEDs along the edge of the device. It is programmable with a custom programming board that uses pogo-pins to make reliable contact. In using the device, it is the designer's hope that the user will become less addicted to time.

The Story Of Beyoncé: The Roborodentia 2016 Contestant, Brandon Arnold, Mana Kulkarni, Aaron Newberg, Jon Sleep

Computer Engineering

No abstract provided.

Prosense, Johnny Favazza Ii, Casey Glasgow, Matt Epperson

Computer Engineering

This project aims to gather advanced data sets from MEMS sensors and GPS and deliver it to the user, who can capitalize on the data. The once negligible half-degree difference of your board barreling down a wave can be recorded from a gyro and exploited for the perfect turn. The exact speed dreaded by longboarders where speed wobbles turn into a road rash can be analysed and consequently avoided. Ascertaining the summit of your flight using combined GPS sensors from the ski ramp allows for the correct timing of tricks. When it comes to pursuing excellence in professional sports, amateur …

Senior Project: Control System For An Underwater Remotely Operated Vehicle, Tyler Mau, Joseph Mahoney

Computer Engineering

No abstract provided.

El Capitán: Cal Poly Rose Float Digital Drive System, Gregory Raffi Baghdikian

Computer Engineering

In today’s world of smartphones, self-driving cars, and internet-connected coffee makers, it seems as if computers are contained in everything around us. These “embedded systems” have become critical components of our lives, improving everything about the things they control, from cost, to speed, to simplicity. One area that embedded systems has hardly gained a foothold is in the world of floatbuilding. Most of the floats in the Tournament of Roses Parade, including the one built jointly by Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and Cal Poly Pomona, are technologically very simple, using mostly analog components and rudimentary discrete digital logic to …

Build-A-Board, Christopher Messerer, Brian Holland

Computer Engineering

The purpose of this project is to build a single board computer that will be able to run Linux and provide some expansion capabilities in the form of GPIO, USB, etc. This single board computer will have all the components that a fully functional computer has but with a much smaller form factor and overall capabilities.

Musictrakr, Benjamin Lin

Computer Engineering

MusicTrackr is an IoT device that musicians attach to their instruments. The device has a start and stop button that allows users to record their playing sessions. Each recorded session is sent wirelessly to a cloud database. An accompanying website displays all of the recorded sessions, organized by date. After picking a specific date, the user can view graphs showing total practice time and average session length as well play back any recordings during that date. In addition, the user may add comments to any specific date or recording. Lastly, the user may tag a specific date with a color …

Oluso, Diego Fernandez, Tyler Heucke, Nishant Mattu, Michael Roesch

Computer Engineering

Oluso is a new startup offering affordable, inexpensive technology to empower the individual. Our product is designed to keep the user in contact with someone close to them in emergency situations. Over the course of the past several months we have performed interviews with both individuals who may be interested in this product as well as organizations who may be interested in purchasing this product for their members. Our product is nearing completion and all of the companies we have interviewed have displayed a significant amount of interest in our product. The combination of easy communication and peace of mind …

Rapid Battery Exchange Automation, Andrea Everson

Computer Engineering

With the drastic threat of exhausting the world’s fossil fuels, society has been scrambling to find alternative forms of energy for transportation. One of these viable options is an electric vehicle powered by batteries. While this idea is fairly viable, consumers are looking to have the same experience with an electric car than they would with a gas-powered vehicle. One of their major concerns is the lack of range in an electric vehicle.

This project aims to present a solution that would extend the range by allowing users to quickly go from low battery to fully charged battery by performing …

Modeling And Python Scripting In Maya For The Animation Short Style, Gilenn Emille G. Collado

Computer Engineering

The computer animation and graphics industry has dramatically improved over the years alongside the growth of technology. This paper discusses how that came about through a specific tool called Maya. It talks about its features and what it can create for you and the world. It also describes how scripting can simplify a job and make more of it. It highlights the effectiveness of the ability to manipulate code to create something amazing.

Astro – A Low-Cost, Low-Power Cluster For Cpu-Gpu Hybrid Computing Using The Jetson Tk1, Sean Kai Sheen

Master's Theses

With the rising costs of large scale distributed systems many researchers have began looking at utilizing low power architectures for clusters. In this paper, we describe our Astro cluster, which consists of 46 NVIDIA Jetson TK1 nodes each equipped with an ARM Cortex A15 CPU, 192 core Kepler GPU, 2 GB of RAM, and 16 GB of flash storage. The cluster has a number of advantages when compared to conventional clusters including lower power usage, ambient cooling, shared memory between the CPU and GPU, and affordability. The cluster is built using commodity hardware and can be setup for relatively low …

The Effects Of Latency On 3d Interactive Data Visualizations, Allen Korenevsky

Master's Theses

Interactive data visualizations must respond fluidly to user input to be effective, or so we assume. In fact it is unknown exactly how fast a visualization must run to present every facet within a dataset. An engineering team with limited resources is left with intuition and estimates to determine if their application performs sufficiently well.

This thesis studies how latency affects users' comprehension of data visualizations, specifically 3D geospatial visualizations with large data sets. Subjects used a climate visualization showing temperatures spanning from the 19th to the 21st century to answer multiple choice questions. Metrics like their eye movements, time …

A Low Cost Timing Generation Unit, Christopher Vochoska

Computer Engineering

No abstract provided.

Roborodentia Robot: Tektronix, Sean Yap

Computer Engineering

Tektronix is a robot created to compete in the 2016 Roborodentia Competition. This report details the full function and implementation of the robot.

Pinpoint: Location Beacon And Tracking, Ezequiel Lopez Iii

Computer Engineering

The purpose of Pinpoint was to create a device that can collect and transmit location information for multiple users on a wireless network. The device would be used to keep track of and communicate with other users nearby. The final design includes a touchscreen display as a graphical user interface (GUI), an XBee RF module for wireless networking, a GPS receiver for location tracking, and a Programmable System on a Chip (PSoC) to control the modules.

Northrop Grumman Collaboration Project, Jose Leopoldo Roman Lujano

Computer Engineering

No abstract provided.

Roborodentia 2016: Scorpion, Tyler Whalen

Computer Engineering

This report showcases my entry into the Roborodentia 2016 competition, and my senior project. I chose this project because robotics has always interested me, and this was a great opportunity to jump in headfirst.

I will step through my design decisions and detail all information necessary for replicating this build.

A Stroke Therapy Brace Design, Evan Kirkbride

Electrical Engineering

Victims of stroke often have difficulty with rehabilitation. With limited movement on their affected arm, patients often do not want to move much for physical therapy. In this project, we design a robotic brace that helps stroke patients move their arm more effectively in a reaching or pulling motion. By giving patients more movement in their affected arm than they would have otherwise, patients gain more from rehabilitation. The brace also adapts to the patient’s needs, providing more inclination or resistance as needed for their physical therapy. This kind of therapy engages patients rather than relying on their likely dwindled …

Polyratings Website Update, Cody Sears, Connor Krier, Anil Thattayathu

Computer Science and Software Engineering

Polyratings is a well known website amongst Cal Poly students. Over the past 14 years it has been in existence the site has been viewed 2.5 million times. This is a drastic number because the average student population on campus every year nears 20,000. This being said, when class registration came around every quarter there was always talk about the Polyratings scores for professors. However, with this talk also came much negativity towards the site.

The problem that we found was that everyone needed Polyratings for help with class searching, but were also very dissatisfied with the website. The main …

Red Piston (Roborodentia), Gabriel Lee Hernandez, Davie Sy

Computer Science and Software Engineering

Roborodentia is an annual robotics competition held during Cal Poly’s Open House showcase. Teams of one to three people come together to build an autonomous robot to typically collect rings for points. The specifications of the competition will be detailed in the problem statement. For Roborodentia 2016, we built a machine dubbed Red Piston to tackle on this year’s competition. The following report will detail the design process and implementation of our robot.

High-Low, Cameron Burwell, Bryce Cheng-Campbell

Computer Science and Software Engineering

The card game High-Low is a cooperative game that provides a unique problem of where all players have partial information and build off other players guesses to win the game. This problem lends itself to creating an AI bot that can play the game with other human players. By making decisions that change as the other players make guesses through the rounds, we have created an AI bot that plays the game with a good degree of accuracy.

Tournament Wizard: Simple And Lightweight Software For Running Fencing Tournaments, John Ryan Daley

Computer Science and Software Engineering

Many sports use technology to assist in officiating and administration. Fencing tournament organizers use specialized software to help determine how their matches occur, and to help them administer a tournament. However, the software most commonly used to run these tournaments has some significant limitations, and is not well-suited for use with small events. As a former President of Cal Poly’s Fencing Club, I have had a chance to interact with one popular application for running fencing tournaments a number of times, and made note of its shortcomings. These included issues with operating system compatibility, license transference, and amount of space …

Fulfilling A Restful Commitment: Test-Suite Generation For Swagger-Based Rest Apis, Noah Dietz

Computer Science and Software Engineering

An application programming interface (API) can be the most integral part of a product or service. APIs drive businesses and innovation in all aspects of technology and they rely on descriptive frameworks to detail what they have to offer. These descriptive frameworks are a rich source of information on a variety of levels, such as usage, best-practices and even basic implications towards the underlying implementation. The motivation of this project during my internship was to exploit this wealth of information in order to create a description-based, or contract-based, unit test generation tool specifically for Swagger-based REST APIs and to encourage …

Anex: Automated Network Exploitation Through Penetration Testing, Eric Francis Dazet

Master's Theses

Cyber attacks are a growing concern in our modern world, making security evaluation a critical venture. Penetration testing, the process of attempting to compromise a computer network with controlled tests, is a proven method of evaluating a system's security measures. However, penetration tests, and preventive security analysis in general, require considerable investments in money, time, and labor, which can cause them to be overlooked. Alternatively, automated penetration testing programs are used to conduct a security evaluation with less user effort, lower cost, and in a shorter period of time than manual penetration tests. The trade-off is that automated penetration testing …

Graph-Based Data Visualization In Virtual Reality: A Comparison Of User Experiences, Paul Andrew Sullivan

Master's Theses

Virtual reality is currently in the spotlight, attracting intense scrutiny by the press, technology companies, and consumers. After twenty years of dormancy, the technology has experienced a renaissance following advancements in both hardware and software. Most of these developments, and thus press attention, have been centered on entertainment. However, if the technology is going to continue to grow, it must be useful in a wide variety of situations. This paper explores the effectiveness of visualizing data in virtual reality in comparison to traditional presentations.

In this thesis, we present an approach to displaying data in a virtual reality environment. We …

Bitrate Classification Of Twice-Encoded Audio Using Objective Quality Features, Colm Sloan, Damien Kelly, Naomi Harte, Anil C. Kokaram, Andrew Hines

Conference papers

When a user uploads audio files to a music stream- ing service, these files are subsequently re-encoded to lower bitrates to target different devices, e.g. low bitrate for mobile. To save time and bandwidth uploading files, some users encode their original files using a lossy codec. The metadata for these files cannot always be trusted as users might have encoded their files more than once. Determining the lowest bitrate of the files allows the streaming service to skip the process of encoding the files to bitrates higher than that of the uploaded files, saving on processing and storage space. This …

Roborodentia Xxi Robot, Jose A. Villa

Computer Engineering

This report covers the design and implementation of a robot built to compete in Roborodentia 2016.

Music Reactive Led Lights, Peter P. Chu

Computer Engineering

This project enhances the user’s music listening experience by not only adding but also synchronizing visuals to the music. The project digitally analyzes music being played back and controls LEDs to give an audio-visual experience. This report describes the materials and knowledge used to create a proof of concept for a wireless and portable music reactive LED lighting system.

Stand, Lisa Yip

Computer Engineering

With busy lives, people sometimes forget to take breaks for multiple hours at a time. The purpose of this project is to remind the user to move around every hour if they have not already. To do so, stand will be a light weight fitness tracker that will detect the number of steps made within an hour. If the step count, dependent on goals, is not met then a vibration motor will gently remind them to take a break and walk. The data throughout the day will be shown on an iOS application where the user will be able to …