Electrical and Electronics 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 …

Test Bench Pcb Design For A Vlsi Grid Cell Chip, Nicholas Bruk, Jason Alexandar

Electrical Engineering

This report presents the design, implementation, and validation of a custom printed circuit board (PCB) test bench for a VLSI grid cell emulation chip. The final board provides two independently adjustable 5V supplies using LM317 linear regulators, eleven potentiometer-controlled bias voltages, high-impedance buffering of analog outputs via an MCP6022 dual operational amplifier, and buffering of digital outputs using a 74HC244 buffer IC. The design includes a 40-pin DIP socket for the VLSI chip, extensive test-point headers for probing, and a 9V battery input for portable operation. Five fully functional boards were fabricated using ExpressPCB and assembled with through-hole components. An …

Design And Parametric Testing Of A Transimpedance Amplifier For Low-Power Biomedical Applications, Stanlon Tan, William Chung, Brandon Wu

Electrical Engineering

This project developed and evaluated an optical sensing system for detecting changes associated with glucose concentration. The system combined a laser-diode, cuvette sample holder, photodiode, resistive-feedback transimpedance amplifier, high-resolution analog-to-digital converter, and microcontroller. Parametric testing evaluated the effects of input current and feedback resistance on transimpedance gain, output range, and linearity. Firmware was developed to configure the ADC, average repeated conversions, monitor measurement variation, convert raw digital counts into voltage using a source-meter calibration equation, and compare sample measurements with a water reference. A cuvette enclosure maintained alignment between the laser-diode, sample, and photodiode while reducing external optical interference. Testing …

Woodward Cuk Converter, Aditi Venkatesh, Jennifer Pereira

Honors Capstones

The purpose of this senior design project is to design and build a Cuk converter, a type of buck–boost converter. The project involves developing an analytical model and validating it through hardware testing. Cuk converters are important because they are widely used in everyday electronics, particularly in renewable energy systems such as solar power, power supplies, and electric vehicles. Their ability to increase, decrease, and reverse the polarity of voltage makes them flexible. The continuous input and output currents result in low ripple, reducing component stress and improving efficiency. To achieve these goals, simulations will be conducted using LTspice to …

Small-Scale Analog Spiking Neural Network: Design And Simulation Of An Analog Deep Neural Network, Lucas Hogue

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Undergraduate Honors Theses

A small-scale analog schematic of a spiking neural network (SNN) is designed and demonstrated through the analog design environment (ADE) within Cadence Virtuoso. An SNN is a type of neuromorphic system that utilizes components mimicking the function of the neurons and synapses found in biological neural networks. The SNN designed in this project is composed of four layers: one input layer, two hidden layers, and one output layer. The inclusion of more than one hidden layer classifies the network as “deep” and increases the network’s efficiency at handling data with increased complexity. The SNN categorizes inputs by producing a set …

Parking Information And Supervision System, Joshua A. Thum, Alex J. Kinch, Jacob A. Dye

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

In densely populated areas, finding parking can be an arduous and time-consuming struggle, especially in large and tall parking decks. Drivers would benefit from a convenient way to find an open parking spot without having to scour the entire lot first. The goal of this project is to sense available parking spots in a parking garage or parking lot using physical object detection and visual detection with computer vision verification, and display the open spots to drivers entering the lot. This information will be displayed locally at the lot and in an app, with the latter allowing someone to see …

Printer For Music Box, Chad Lewis, Caleb Murawski, Zion Smith, Bryan Tibbs

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

The traditional method of creating music box sheet music involves manually punching holes into a paper strip using a hand-operated hole punch. This process involves precise knowledge of each note’s location and the ability to achieve perfect accuracy for hours.

The goal of this system is to automate this process, significantly reducing the time required while greatly improving the accuracy of the resulting music box playback. The user simply uploads a MIDI file of their choice into a user-friendly application. Here, the file is modified based on the user’s needs and sent to an automated hole-punching system to punch the …

Dashboard And Racing Telemetry, Cole Barach, Jacob Koshel, Ethan Zifzal, Matthew Sullivan

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

The main goal of the project is to design and manufacture a combined dashboard and data logger for the vehicles produced by the Zips Racing design team. The dashboard will intuitively display real-time information to the driver and record all received information while driving. This information may be pulled off the device later for performing data analysis. This project will incorporate custom PCB design, surface mount soldering, embedded software development, and the CAN communication protocol.

Aquaflow Pro, Ashton Henley, Jeannie Fritz, Khalin Rubbo

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

Changing aquarium water is a hassle, and when done incorrectly, it will result in changes in water quality and potential harm to aquatic life. Aquarium water changes are crucial in removing toxins such as ammonia, nitrites, and nitrates. There is a need for an automated, stressless fish tank water-changing solution that ensures aquatic safety. To this end, an automatic temperature-controlled fish tank water changing system was designed, carrying out a water change for a designated main tank in which water heated within an inbound reservoir is pumped into the tank to replace the outbound water, responding to both the tank’s …

Experimental Validation Of Optical Wireless Communication And Power Transfer For Uav Applications, Fnu Dhruv

UNF Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have revolutionized emergency response, disaster assessment, and search-and-rescue operations. However, their operational efficacy is fundamentally constrained by limited battery endurance and the susceptibility of traditional radio-frequency communication to disruption in adverse weather. To address these limitations, this thesis proposes and experimentally validates a novel architecture integrating Free-Space Optical (FSO) communication with Simultaneous Lightweight Information and Power Transfer (SLIPT). This system utilizes a split-beam configuration to concurrently enable high-bandwidth data transmission and optical energy harvesting to replenish the UAV's battery pack. The research was conducted in three progressive phases. Initially, system feasibility was established through rigorous optical …

Pseudo-Soft-Switching Switched-Capacitor Drive Circuits For Small-Scale Dielectric Actuators, Yanqiao Li

Dartmouth College Ph.D Dissertations

Applications including micro-robotics and haptics have motivated extensive exploration of dielectric actuators due to their high bandwidth and high efficiency at cm and mm scales. To maximize their benefits, dielectric actuators, including piezoelectric and electrostatic actuators, typically require high driving voltages, ranging from 100V to several kV. Generating such high driving voltages presents a challenge for drive circuits, particularly when powered by a small battery. Dielectric actuators are predominantly capacitive in most circumstances, necessitating the drive circuits to deliver and recover reactive energy for efficient operation. In some applications, such as micro-robotics, the drive circuits may need to have a …

Development Of An Embedded Iot Board For Real-Time Floor Estimation Of Autonomous Robots, Carter J. Sorensen

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

As service robots become more prevalent in multi-story environments such as hospitals, hotels, and laboratories, accurate floor-level detection is critical to ensuring operational reliability. Consider a robot tasked with delivering medical samples in a multi-story laboratory. Without accurate feedback, a robot exiting on the wrong floor could introduce delays, disrupt workflows, or compromise sample integrity. Internet of Things (IoT) technologies offer a way to address these risks by providing real-time error detection and corrective capability. However, current IoT-based floor estimation systems often require invasive modifications to building infrastructure—particularly elevator control panels. These approaches introduce challenges related to cost, liability, backward …

Design Of A Subthreshold Cmos Inverter-Based Amplifier For Low-Noise And Low-Power Applications, Landon Alexander Schmucker

Electrical and Computer Engineering ETDs

Amplification is a fundamental function in most analog circuits. There is a fast-growing demand for low-power, low-noise, and high-gain amplifiers. Modern semiconductor processes are increasingly optimized for digital applications, which has introduced new challenges in analog design. To address these challenges, analog designers have investigated replacing conventional analog circuits with digital implementations. One promising application is the typical CMOS inverter as an amplifier.

This research presents a CMOS inverter-based amplifier with feedback designed to achieve low power consumption, low input noise, and high gain. Unlike typical CMOS inverter-based amplifiers, this topology has two distinctive features: (1) it uses a MOSFET …

Development Of A Cost-Effective Daq For Measuring Brake Performance In Race Cars, Adrin Alias

2025 Spring Honors Capstone Projects - Archive

This project explores the feasibility of creating a cost-effective data acquisition (DAQ) system for high-speed, real-time brake performance testing of Formula SAE racecars. The research addresses the limitations of the current MoTeC DAQ system currently employed by the team, which is costly and time-consuming to set up for on-car testing. The team will use a brake dynamometer for steady-state comparisons of different brake pad compounds (senior design project), but evaluating real-world performance requires on-car testing. By systematically comparing various hardware platforms, sensors, communication protocols, and storage solutions, this project aims to balance cost-efficiency with reliability and performance. The research evaluates …

Hybrid Dc-Dc Converters For Soft Charging Capacitive Actuators: Modeling, Analysis And Design, Bahlakoana Mabetha

Dartmouth College Ph.D Dissertations

Recent trends in haptics, microrobotics and ultrasound technology have shown an increasing use of piezoelectric and other electrostatic actuators. These actuators are suited for miniaturized applications due to their high power density and favorable scalability at a small size. Their electrical impedance at lower frequency (their typical operating range) is capacitive, therefore, they can be modeled as capacitive loads.

The driving circuits for capacitive actuators need to deliver and recover (bidirectional) dominantly reactive power, unlike typical power electronics converters for resistive loads which deliver (unidirectional) real power to the load. Therefore, the circuits, operation, and optimization required to drive these …

Autonomous Landscape Exploration Rover Using Imaging Surface Navigation (Alexis), Noah Jones, Dominic Salupo

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

The objective is to develop a small-form-factor rover prototype that can be used to prove out a novel traversal method for use on extraterrestrial surfaces. The novel traversal method being proposed is LIDAR/CV-enhanced navigation, provided by a detachable flight vehicle that can communicate with the rover. On planets with thin atmospheres, cold gas thrusters or similar may be needed, but for the scope of this project more traditional flight/propulsion methods will be used.

Batteryless Nfc-Enabled Wireless Sensor Node: Design, Optimization, And Implementation, Rishin Patra

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

This thesis presents the design, construction, and testing of a batteryless Near-field communication (NFC) powered wireless sensor node intended for maintenance free, short range Internet of Things (IoT) applications. The work focuses on harvesting energy from a 13.56 MHz NFC field to power a very low-power sensing platform capa- ble of measuring temperature, pressure, and humidity without the use of batteries or wired power. The motivation behind this approach is the growing need for reliable, sustainable, and low-maintenance sensing systems that can operate in environments where battery replacement is impractical, undesirable, or environmentally costly. The prototype is built around a …

Automated Solutions For Hydroponic Plant Growth, Sydney Mcclure, Adam Lachguar

Sustainability Conference

Within the past year, Project H.O.M.E. has been focusing on the design and development of a semi-automatic hydroponic system specifically for sustaining plant life in Martian-like conditions. Given the significance of extended space-based travel, where the duration of human life in space is a crucial factor, growing food becomes imperative. This project has integrated electrical engineering and computer science, with features like automated pH testing and sensor-based evaluations. Key functionalities, including timed watering and automatic adjustments, were coded to enhance plant care. Initially, the project’s comprehensive research and strategic planning resulted in detailed blueprints and computer-aided design models for the …

Design And Implementation Of An Inverted Short Baseline Acoustic Positioning System, Jakob Frabosilio

Master's Theses

This document details the design, implementation, testing, and analysis of an inverted short baseline acoustic positioning system. The system presented here is an above-water, air-based prototype for an underwater acoustic positioning system; it is designed to determine the position of remotely-operated underwater vehicles (ROVs) and autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) in the global frame using a method that does not drift over time.

A ground-truth positioning system is constructed using a stacked hexapod platform actuator, which mimics the motion of an AUV and provides the true position of an ultrasonic microphone array. An ultrasonic transmitter sends a pulse of sound towards …

Physical Effects On The Worst-Case Delay Analysis And Signal Integrity Of Buses And Spirals, Mahmoud Mahany

Theses and Dissertations

Physical effects have a significant impact on the IC design which will be investigated in this thesis. Moving toward advanced technology nodes, magnetic effects become more dominant than capacitive effects. As the dimensions of the devices go down and the interconnect manipulates the circuit behavior more and more. Cross talking and voltage drops are affecting the design heavily, however - going to the full electromagnetic point of view - current return path (CRP) adds significant parasitics to the performance of the chip. Neglecting the CRP gives wrong intuition and simulation of the designs, especially that the environment and surroundings can …

Design And Analysis Of Passive Correlator Radio-Frequency Identification Tagging, Albert Kilgore

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is a technology used in many industries to locate and track assets. Passive RFID tags are popular because they are inexpensive and flexible, but they have limited accuracy. My thesis aims to improve the accuracy of passive RFID tags by investigating two solutions: (a) Using orthogonal RFID configuration and exploiting phase information available to an RFID reader, in addition to the received signal strength indicator (RSSI) metric; and (b) Designing a novel voltage multiplier-based correlator circuit that can be integrated directly onto the tag. To further reduce power consumption and silicon area, we propose an architecture …

Building A Wireless Electronic Control Unit For An Electric Vehicle, Hector S. Sosa

2024 Spring Honors Capstone Projects - Archive

Modern vehicles have a variety of features such remote start systems, advance drive assist systems, smart suspension systems, and a feature rich infotainment system. With all this technology in the car, there exists a complex network of computers working together in conjunction to deliver the modern driving experience that many people have today. To be competitive in the market, auto manufacturers are tasked to add additional features to vehicles by adding additional or modifying electronic control units (ECUs). In this study, an ECU will be designed for a mock electric vehicle which contains an already established network of ECU’s. The …

Analyzing A Software Based Lossy Compression Algorithm On An Fpga Platform, Tripp Herlong

All Theses

In HPC, the ability to generate data is outpacing our hardware capabilities of storing said data. This presents the need for compression so we can keep important data preserved without costly hardware upgrades or worrying about hardware speed limitations. Traditional forms of compression are software based, which presents a speed issue that can lead to bottlenecks when storing data.Scientific data lossy compression methods such as SZ enable a speedup on memory transfer by simplifying computation to minimize the essential data size. SZx is a lightweight version of the popular SZ floating point compressor that may benefit from hardware acceleration. This …

Towards A Wearable Device For Measuring Impedance Plethysmography Of The Radial Artery, Pritom Chowdhury

Dartmouth College Master’s Theses

Recent advancements in bioimpedance technology have demonstrated significant promise in the application of cardiac health monitoring. This research explores the design and development of a forearm-based wearable bioimpedance device for non-invasive measurement of heart rate and respiratory rate at an accuracy level comparable to medical-grade monitors. It utilizes a tetrapolar electrode configuration to analyze bioimpedance changes in the radial artery due to blood flow.

An ongoing aspect of this work involves the preliminary development of an embedded framework intended to integrate signal generation, acquisition, and processing within the device to achieve compact and efficient system design, anticipated to contribute to …

Development Of A Low-Cost Resistivity Meter For Local Groundwater Survey, Jose Claro N. Monje, Ma. Leonora Guico, Carlos M. Oppus, Mark Glenn F. Retirado, Alfonso Rafael Cuezon, Justin Bryce M. Torres

Electronics, Computer, and Communications Engineering Faculty Publications

The researchers developed a low-cost resistivity meter with a built-in data file storage system using locally available parts. This effort was done in partnership with the National Water Resources Board and the Department of Science and Technology under the Water for Tourism project for water quality monitoring in tourist areas in the Philippines such as Boracay and Caticlan. The resistivity meter system consists of a power supply module, a sensor module, and an equipment module, built using locally available materials and equipment, emulating the commercially available PASI model 16 GL-N. Due to pandemic restrictions, the developed prototype could only be …

Reinventing Integrated Photonic Devices And Circuits For High Performance Communication And Computing Applications, Venkata Sai Praneeth Karempudi

Theses and Dissertations--Electrical and Computer Engineering

The long-standing technological pillars for computing systems evolution, namely Moore's law and Von Neumann architecture, are breaking down under the pressure of meeting the capacity and energy efficiency demands of computing and communication architectures that are designed to process modern data-centric applications related to Artificial Intelligence (AI), Big Data, and Internet-of-Things (IoT). In response, both industry and academia have turned to 'more-than-Moore' technologies for realizing hardware architectures for communication and computing. Fortunately, Silicon Photonics (SiPh) has emerged as one highly promising ‘more-than-Moore’ technology. Recent progress has enabled SiPh-based interconnects to outperform traditional electrical interconnects, offering advantages like high bandwidth density, …

Smart Longboard, Ben Rath

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

The proposed design project includes a motorized longboard, equipped with a wireless handheld remote to manage the speed of the board. An embedded system mounted underneath the board will gather data from an accelerometer and a GPS sensor. This information is sent through a Bluetooth connection to a compatible smartphone application where it will be displayed. The project also includes a custom battery and charging circuit for the board to ensure that all of the engineering requirements are met. The board will be easy to use and the smartphone application will be able to display ride statistics of the user …

A Novel Processor Architecture Implementing The Stacked Error Diffusion Algorithm And Its Zynq-Based Realization, Qishi Hu

Theses and Dissertations--Electrical and Computer Engineering

Digital halftoning reproduces continuous-tone images using patterns of black and white dots, while multitoning extends this concept by incorporating inks with intermediate intensities. These techniques are extensively utilized in the printing industry to accommodate the limited range of inks available in printers. Stacked error diffusion is a high-quality multitoning algorithm that adheres to the blue-noise dithering standard. This thesis research studies the potential parallelism inherent in the algorithm and introduces the design of a novel processor architecture optimized for efficient execution. The architecture is realized on an FPGA development board featuring a Zynq SoC. Additionally, the hardware prototype can also …

Low Power Remote Sensing System For Ceramic Thermocouples, Syed Khaleduzzaman

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

The ceramic thermocouple sensor is a promising alternative to traditional thermocouple due to their corrosion resistance and cost-effective manufacturing. Currently, no electronic Interface or Integrated Circuit solution is commercially available which can be used to interface these thermocouples at low-cost and low power for accurate temperature measurement. An electronic system is needed to use these ceramic sensors which consumes less amount of power for an extensive period of time with remote monitoring option.

This thesis proposes a low-power electronic remote sensing system that works for ceramic thermocouples. The system consists of three parts. They are battery-operated sensor node electronic circuit, …

Electronic Note-String Detector, Gavin Garcia-Rossi, Tommy Smail

Electrical Engineering

As the virtual space has become a dominant part of everyone’s day-to-day lives, many normal face-to-face interactions and services have not yet been facilitated by adapting technology. One of these prevailing areas is music lessons. Over Zoom meetings, or other virtual platforms, it is tremendously challenging to teach students. These challenges include recognizing student mistakes audibly and visually, and being able to give confident feedback on the incorrect notes played by learning musicians. Without having to delve into improving the complex systems that would be required to improve audio, video, and connection quality of these connections, we have another solution …