Other Computer Engineering Commons^™

Check Image Processing: Webp Conversion And Micr Scan Android Application, Trevor Bliss

Computer Engineering

As more users favor smartphones over computers for simple tasks, small businesses are constantly exploring mobile options to present to their customers. This write-up documents an Android application designed for a small company, which allows users to send pictures of checks to the company’s servers for processing. The picture is taken with the devices built-in camera and is converted to Google’s new image format, WebP. The company’s server processes the check and returns the check’s MICR code as a response. This application leverages the Android NDK and JNI to use Google’s open source image conversion libraries as well as socket …

Kreative Outlets, Travis Crist, Steve Clark, Jason Peressini

Computer Engineering

With the widespread use of smart phones and the advancement of WiFi technologies, people now have the Internet at their fingertips at all times. Home automation and control has the possibility of becoming the next big technology that can utilize the abundant availability of the Internet. This paper documents the findings and results of a project aimed at developing the infrastructure needed for a home automation system that is accessible anywhere. We implemented a system that utilized a web enabled ethernet connection and RF wireless technology to control AC outlets and provide the user with feedback information about the status …

Bluemote!, Philip Kaye

Computer Engineering

In today’s society, our mobile phones are an extremely useful device when we are on the go and away from our homes; however, when we return home, our smart phone becomes just a communication tool again. Home automation is inevitable, and it will find its way into every house. The first person to commercialize it to the point where it is as easy to set-up and as affordable as a home router will end up breaking this slow trend. The key to this success is the smart phone; this should end up being the most expensive piece of hardware for …

An Interactive Visualization Model For Analyzing Data Storage System Workloads, Steven Charubhat Pungdumri

Master's Theses

The performance of hard disks has become increasingly important as the volume of data storage increases. At the bottom level of large-scale storage networks is the hard disk. Despite the importance of hard drives in a storage network, it is often difficult to analyze the performance of hard disks due to the sheer size of the datasets seen by hard disks. Additionally, hard drive workloads can have several multi-dimensional characteristics, such as access time, queue depth and block-address space. The result is that hard drive workloads are extremely diverse and large, making extracting meaningful information from hard drive workloads very …

Cplop - Cal Poly's Library Of Pyroprints, Kevin Webb

Computer Engineering

California Polytechnic Library of Pyroprints, CPLOP, is a web driven data-base application that stores data from the biology’s departments E. coli Pyrosequencing project. Some of this data was stored in Excel datasheets, while data from the pyrosequencing machines was stored as just a list of random .xml files. There was no useful way to organize and store the massive amounts of data from multiple file sources in one location, nor to perform the complicated searches and comparisons that the project requires. CPLOP’s primary goal is to store such data in three organized tables that relate to one another. It was …

Wireless Solar-Powered Thermal Imaging Camera, Andy Bonk, Billy Mcvicker, Jacob Richardson

Mechanical Engineering

Creation of a mounted wireless self-powered thermal imaging camera system.

Historic Calculator Project, Will Harris, Dan Marioni, Kevin Webb, Chad Williams

Mechanical Engineering

The Deutsches Museum of Munich, Germany requested add-on components to their mechanical calculator exhibit. The end-goal is to produce an interactive 3D model in software to demonstrate the functions of the Braun-Vayringe Machine (BVM). There will be four students working on this project at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo: two mechanical engineers (Dan Marioni and Will Harris) and two computer engineers (Chad Williams and Kevin Webb).This project involves the coordination of three facilities; the Deutsches Museum, and the Mechanical and Computer Science Departments of Cal Poly. The name of the project is known as the Historic Calculator Project …

Auto Fall Detector, Nhut Thanh Ho

Computer Engineering

This device is named Cardea, the goddess of health in roman Mythology. The Cardea will be attached to the waist of the individual’s body to detect any falls, and will send out alarm signals to people in the surrounding area. The end goal of this project is to provide a helpful and friendly device for the elderly and their families. It is easy to maintain and dependable for long term use.

Myrrrrr's Dice Game Android Application, Craig Leitterman

Computer Engineering

Smartphones are one the newest and fastest growing hardware platforms in recent years. The number of users playing and downloading games on the Android and iPhone application markets are growing rapidly. A majority of users including myself have been known to play common retro games such as solitaire as well as newer flash games like Angry Birds. These titles are usually “pick up and play” and provide quick entertainment while you’re waiting for the bus or in between a work break. Given the huge popularity of these applications I decided to create a dice game that I used to play …

Fault Tolerant And Flexible Cubesat Software Architecture, Greg D. Manyak

Master's Theses

The CubeSat pico-satellite is gaining popularity in both the educational and aerospace industries.  Due to a lack of experience and constrained hardware capabilities, most of the university missions have been educational in nature.  Cal Poly's project, PolySat, has gained significant experience from the launch of five CubeSats and has designed an entirely new hardware platform based on the knowledge gained from these missions. This hardware is a significant upgrade from what the previous missions used and has greatly increased the capabilities of the software, including supporting the use of the open source operating system Linux.

Leveraging the previous PolySat experience, …

Cp7 And Datalogger Design And Implementation, Hoang (Mike) Tran

Computer Engineering

No abstract provided.

Chinese To English Introductory Cover Letter Generator, Jason L. Stine

Liberal Arts and Engineering Studies

The Chinese to English Introductory Cover Letter Generator allows Chinese computer users who know little to no English automatically generate a self-introductory cover letter in good English. As an example, professors in English-speaking countries are increasingly receiving emails from students abroad in countries like China, and these students often need to introduce themselves in order to support their reasons for their message. Unfortunately, more often than not these letters contain poorly written English. This software aims to help solve this issue. Using a combination of a “sentence template” system and intelligent natural language processing software, the program assembles each paragraph …

Active Pen Input And The Android Input Framework, Andrew S. Hughes

Master's Theses

User input has taken many forms since the conception of computers. In the past ten years, Tablet PCs have provided a natural writing experience for users with the advent of active pen input. Unfortunately, pen based input has yet to be adopted as an input method by any modern mobile operating system. This thesis investigates the addition of active pen based input to the Android mobile operating system.

The Android input framework was evaluated and modified to allow for active pen input events. Since active pens allow for their position to be detected without making contact with the screen, an …

The State Of Software Engineering Maturity And Licensure, Travis Lawrence Dean

Master's Theses

IEEE-CS is pursuing licensing for software engineers, but ACM believes that software engineering is too immature, and regulating the profession would be premature. In 1996, Norman Gibbs and Gary Ford from Carnegie Mellon University performed a qualitative survey of the maturity of the software engineering profession. I apply this model to the present state of the art in software engineering and analyze the results for 2010. I analyze the maturity of software engineering to determine that the profession is not yet ready for licensure. This is not because the infrastructure of software engineering is too immature, but because we have …

Development Of A Cubesat Payload To Model Particle Dampening In Space: Design And Implementation Of Software For Cp7, Daniel Walker

Computer Engineering

The California Polytechnic State University CubeSat student research & development group, PolySat, is currently in a mature development stage of a single unit CubeSat designated CP7. The CP7 mission implements a scientific payload designed to characterize particle dampers in microgravity conditions. When subjected to vibration, the momentum exchanges and frictional forces of the particles create a damping effect that can be optimized to suit a number of applications over a broad frequency and amplitude range. In space based applications, particle dampers would serve as a robust and simple device to eliminate jitter in optical assemblies and other sensitive instrumentation. This …

Ultrasonic Shark-Tag Locator System For Iver2 Auv, Nathaniel Garcia

Computer Engineering

The purpose of this project is to develop a system for tracking an ultrasonic underwater transmitter that can be integrated into an IVER2 AUV to allow it to follow and monitor tagged sharks in the ocean for scientific research.

The system consists of a four main components including a shark-tag, two hydrophones, a filter/amplifier & threshold detector circuit, and a microcontroller.

This project, while not completing field testing and integration with the IVER2, is a proof of concept of a system that utilizes passive sonar to determine a bearing from the system to a shark-tag transmitter. Additionally, it devised several …

A Low Power Touch Screen Document Viewer, Chris Perfetto

Computer Engineering

This document will cover the requirements, design, implementation and testing of a low power touch screen document viewer to serve as a replacement bulletin board. It was Implemented using a BeagleBoard development board, a 4.3” touchscreen LCD and a SD card with a Ubuntu Linux OS installed. The testing of this device is primarily testing the power consumption. The device is not yet complete and will require further development for it to completely satisfy the requirements.

Household Outlet Monitoring And Control System, Michael Young

Computer Engineering

No abstract provided.

Wii-Mote Head Tracking: A Three Dimensional Virtual Reality Display, David Fairman

Computer Engineering

The goal of this project is to create a customizable three dimensional virtual reality display on a system available to any non-technical user. This System will use the infrared camera component of a standard Nintendo Wii-mote to track a user's head motions in all six major directions. The virtual reality will be a customizable image projected onto a screen or simply shown on a computer or TV monitor. In order to appear 3-dimensional, the image will continually change according to the position of the user's head. As the user moves their head to the left and right, portions of the …

Memento: Personal Scrapbook Android Application, Ryan Joseph Rosete

Computer Engineering

The Memento project focuses on providing Android phone users with a new alternative to capture memories. Its main purpose is to create an application that stores pictures and data on an Android phone. Users can view these saved entries for later use to recall what they have done in the past or show to others. The initial idea for this project stemmed from a personal interest in both scrapbooks and popular microblog services. The application aims to provide a new service that is currently not offered in the Android Market.

In order to create this application, there are two main …

Textured Hierarchical Precomputed Radiance Transfer, Harrison Lee Mckenzie Chapter

Master's Theses

Computing complex lighting simulations such as global illumination is a computationally intensive task. Various real time solutions exist to approximate aspects of global illumination such as shadows, however, few of these methods offer single pass rendering solutions for soft shadows (self and other) and inter-reflections. In contrast, Precomputed Radiance Transfer (PRT) is a real-time computer graphics technique which pre-calculates an object's response to potential incident light. At run time, the actual incident light can be used to quickly illuminate the surface, rendering effects such as soft self-shadows and inter-reflections. In this thesis, we show that by calculating PRT lighting coefficients …

Global Positioning Logger, Matthew Hall

Computer Engineering

The Global Positioning Logger (GPL) is a mobile embedded device that utilizes GPS technology. The GPS data is used to display current speed and past global locations.

Exploring The Relationship Of The Closeness Of A Genetic Algorithm's Chromosome Encoding To Its Problem Space, Kevin Mccullough

Master's Theses

For historical reasons, implementers of genetic algorithms often use a haploid binary primitive type for chromosome encoding. I will demonstrate that one can reduce development effort and achieve higher fitness by designing a genetic algorithm with an encoding scheme that closely matches the problem space. I will show that implicit parallelism does not result in binary encoded chromosomes obtaining higher fitness scores than other encodings. I will also show that Hamming distances should be understood as part of the relationship between the closeness of an encoding to the problem instead of assuming they should always be held constant. Closeness to …

Controlling The Uncontrollable: A New Approach To Digital Storytelling Using Autonomous Virtual Actors And Environmental Manipulation, Matthew J. Colon

Master's Theses

In most video games today that focus on a single story, scripting languages are used for controlling the artificial intelligence of the virtual actors. While scripting is a great tool for reliably performing a story, it has many disadvantages; mainly, it is limited by only being able to respond to those situations that were explicitly declared, causing unreliable responses to unknown situations, and the believability of the virtual actor is hindered by possible conflicts between scripted actions and appropriate responses as perceived by the viewer. This paper presents a novel method of storytelling by manipulating the environment, whether physically or …

Wi-Fi Localization Using Rssi Fingerprinting, Michael Quan, Eduardo Navarro, Benjamin Peuker

Computer Engineering

Wireless Local Area Networks using Wi-Fi is becoming more and more ubiquitous. As such, they provide a potential pre-built infrastructure for small area localization. This project serves as a proof of concept for a playground child tracking system to be deployed at Cal Poly's Child Development Playground Lab. The two main options for doing Wi-Fi localization are triangulation and fingerprinting. Triangulation involves mapping signal strength as a function of distance while fingerprinting creates a probability distribution of signal strengths at a given location and uses a map of these distributions to predict a location given signal strength samples. The triangulation …

Redesigning Src2pkg, A Linux Package Creation Toolkit, Timothy Goya

Computer Science and Software Engineering

Package managers ease installation and removal of applications. However, as the name indicates, in order for a package manager to be useful, they need packages created from upstream sources to manage. This is the purpose of src2pkg, a toolkit written in Bash shell script which automates many package creation tasks. src2pkg, however, suffers from major design flaws that cripple its ability to package some exotic upstream sources. src2pkg-ng is a prototype redesign of src2pkg that eliminates these flaws. src2pkg-ng fully supports creating packages for Slackware and Slackware-compatible variants for at least 21 upstream sources with various levels of complexity. Debian …

Tsukahara: A Comprehensive Web Solution Designed To Simplify The Process Of Hosting A Gymnastics Meet., Jonathan Thomassian

Computer Science and Software Engineering

The process of setting up a gymnastics meet is long and complicated. Most meets organized today involve large amounts of paperwork by both organizing gyms and attending gyms. Tsukahara seeks to address this issue by providing a comprehensive web based solution, to make it easy for gyms to both host and attend meets.

Affine Region Tracking And Augmentation Using Mser And Adaptive Sift Model Generation, Matthew James Marano

Master's Theses

Relatively complex Augmented Reality (AR) algorithms are becoming widely available due to advancements in affordable mobile computer hardware. To take advantage of this a new method is developed for tracking 2D regions without a prior knowledge of an environment and without developing a computationally expensive world model. In the method of this paper, affinely invariant planar regions in a scene are found using the Maximally Stable Extremal Region (MSER) detector. A region is selected by the user to define a search space, and then the Scale Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT) is used to detect affine invariant keypoints in the region. …

A System For Natural Language Unmarked Clausal Transformations In Text-To-Text Applications, Daniel Miller

Master's Theses

A system is proposed which separates clauses from complex sentences into simpler stand-alone sentences. This is useful as an initial step on raw text, where the resulting processed text may be fed into text-to-text applications such as Automatic Summarization, Question Answering, and Machine Translation, where complex sentences are difficult to process. Grammatical natural language transformations provide a possible method to simplify complex sentences to enhance the results of text-to-text applications. Using shallow parsing, this system improves the performance of existing systems to identify and separate marked and unmarked embedded clauses in complex sentence structure resulting in syntactically simplified source for …

Bottom-Up Ontology Creation With A Direct Instance Input Interface, Charles C.H. Wei

Master's Theses

In general an ontology is created by following a top-down, or so called genus-species approach, where the species are differentiated from the genus and from each other by means of differentiae [8]. The superconcept is the genus, every subconcept is a species, and the differentiae correspond to roles. To complete it a user organizes data into a proper structure, accompanied with the instances in that domain in order to complete the construction of an ontology. It is a concept learning procedure in a school, for example. Students first learn the general knowledge and apply it to their exercise and homework …