Electrical and Electronics Commons^™

Active Charge Balancing For Cardiac Stimulation, Maci Miri

Electrical Engineering

Worldwide, there are about 3 million people who have pacemakers, with 10,000 new implantations of ICD’s each month. [heart.org] Due to the gravity and importance of the function that ICD’s provide, these devices must be extremely reliable and highly effective. However, because of the high tolerances of IC manufacturing, stimulation circuits for pacemakers may be slightly unmatched and over time, may have a net DC charge applied to the tissues in the heart. Extra charge pumped into body tissues is dangerous for the patient’s health; the pH of the tissue can be raised and corrosion of the stimulating electrodes may …

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 …

Car Safe, David Van Workum

Electrical Engineering

The Car Safe project helps protect parents and caretakers from the dangers associated with leaving children in hot vehicles. The device supports parents through notifying them of the child’s wellbeing and status while within an automobile. Specifically, the device monitors the child’s ergonomic experience and the spatial proximity between the caretaker and child. Car Safe utilizes this information and determines if the child finds himself in a dangerous environment. Due to its compact design, the device functions independently of a specific car seat design, allowing customers to integrate Car Safe in the car seat environment of their choosing.

Cal Poly Supermileage Electronic Fuel Injection, Alexander Pink

Electrical Engineering

Cal Poly Supermileage is a student-run engineering club that builds prototype gasoline vehicles optimized maximum fuel-efficiency. To power their vehicles, the Supermileage team makes use of single-cylinder, 4-stroke, electronically fuel-injected (EFI) gasoline engines. This report details the development, iterative design & test cycles, and integration of an EFI system for the Supermileage club. This project develops an EFI system that interfaces to the most common types of sensors found in the low-power Supermileage-range of engines, including throttle-position sensors, manifold absolute pressure sensors, gear-tooth hall-effect sensors, variable-reluctance position sensors, engine coolant temperature sensors, intake air temperature sensors, and exhaust oxygen sensors. …

Camera Stabilizer, Nathaniel Bryan, Sean Chappell, Danielle Williams

Electrical Engineering

The goal of this project is to create an affordable camera stabilizer (the “stabilizer”) for consumers to use with cell phones or GoPro cameras. The stabilizer compensates for two axes, pitch and roll, as well as vertical movement. The system (currently only compatible with one cell phone model) is handheld and uses a combination of brushless DC motors, an Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU), and a microcontroller to compensate for the operator’s movements, stabilizing the phone for nonshaky, high quality video recording. The stabilizer provides a lowcost alternative to professional stabilization solutions employed in the production of featurelength films; the system …

Exertion Control, Travis Taylor

Electrical Engineering

Current wearable fitness devices give the user after-the-fact fitness data, but little real-time feedback. Exertion Control, a new wearable device, continuously measures the user’s heart rate, creates a heart rate target, and helps the user reach it. This project completes the senior design and master’s thesis requirements and contains two milestones. The senior design product continuously measures the wearer’s heart rate and logs it with a user-friendly interface. This data models the heart’s exertion response and recovery response. The master’s thesis device refines the closed control loop with the user to give them a workout optimized to fit their needs.

Robotic Overbed Table, Jonathan Lantz

Electrical Engineering

Traditionally overbed tables have simple and cheap designs, yet contain many disadvantages compared to the design proposed in this report. Disabled or bedridden persons, often require the use of a bedside table either in hospital environments or at home. Unfortunately, many modern overbed tables require the user to get out of bed and move in order to adjust and position the table. Incorporating a singlebutton control panel that allows the user to make adjustments and access other features independently, creates more accessible product. Integrated subsystems must control all motors and interfaces with an easy access control panel in order to …

Usb-Powered Turntable "Turn T", Gerardo Sevilla, James Lougaris

Electrical Engineering

No abstract provided.

Midfield Rf Signal Detector, Dawei Zhang

Electrical Engineering

This project is part of a Master’s thesis which looks at alternative ways to measure blood glucose. The Master’s thesis uses mid-field signals in order to match impedance and therefore lose less power as they travel through flesh. The goal of this senior project is to build a receiver for those signals and give accurate RSSI (received signal strength indicator) measurements. Mid-fields were originally explored by Stanford professor Dr. Ada Poon [3] who used the signaling technique to recharge the batteries of deeply implanted devices. Devices implanted near the surface of the skin were able to have their batteries recharged …

Mohat Tool To Illustrate Diode And Transistor Modes Of Operation Using Ltspice, Getu D. Engdaw

Electrical Engineering

This project develops a tool to identify the modes of operation of diodes and transistors in a circuit. The MoHAT tool receives schematics or circuit files generated from LTspice, and it determines the state of each diode and transistor. This tool illustrates diodes, BJT and MOS regions of operations using text or graphics accordingly. The tool also suggests necessary adjustments to switch from one mode of operation to another upon users request. Furthermore, the tool specifies if a transistor functions in amplification region. The MoHAT tool compares the nodal voltages of an element and determines the mode of operation.

Smart Power Strip, Dannie Alfaro

Electrical Engineering

The Smart Power Strip revolutionizes all common power strips. Users have the ability to remotely toggle the individual outlets on the Smart Power Strip from a smart phone app and can also monitor how much energy the devices connected to the Smart Power Strip consume.

The Electric Reel For Soccer Fields, Stephen Taylor

Electrical Engineering

Painting a soccer field consumes too much time. The process of reeling the string after laying out string along the field needs to improve. As a result, my project addresses improvements in how the workers retrieve the string through the production of an electric reel. This electric reel allows the worker to have control of the speed, direction, and on/off state of the device. Direction control allows the user ability to reel and unwind the string. Variable speed allows the user to control how fast the reel unwinds and reels the string. The device gathers string in an orderly manner …

Permanent Magnet Display System, Xenia Leon Rodriguez

Electrical Engineering

Pacemakers can malfunction when exposed to high magnetic fields. This becomes especially problematic for patients with pacemakers who need MRI scans as MRI machines can subject the pacemaker to damaging magnetic fields. St.Jude Medical, one of the leading biotech companies, is working to make their pacemakers MRI-safe. In order to test their MRI-safe pacemaker designs, they need an automated test apparatus that will collect and report the magnetic field the pacemaker is being exposed to. This report describes the design of such a test system that reads the Tesla intensity the pacemaker is exposed to and wirelessly transmits the data …

Color Amplification, Jose Carrillo, Cynthia Barajas

Electrical Engineering

The goal of this project is to design and implement a hardware version of MIT’s and Cal Poly’s color amplification system. MIT created a software based system named the “Eulerian Video Magnification” that can reveal small variations that cannot be seen with the naked eye by processing the input sequence of the video. The process consists of using a Gaussian pyramid with a Gaussian kernel in order to do spatial decomposition. This process continues until there is one pixel left which then gets amplified and added back onto each pixel of the original frame for reconstruction. The reconstructed signal can …

Phase Locked Loop Integrated Circuit, Scott Buchanan, Jonathan Bonello

Electrical Engineering

No abstract provided.

Sun-Tracking Solar-Powered Led Street Light, Wesley Ballar, Harrison Wong

Electrical Engineering

Street lighting is an essential utility especially in urban and industrialized areas because it provides illumination and safety for vehicles and pedestrians throughout the night. However, street lights are relatively inefficient; they consume large amounts of power from electrical grids and have predetermined operation times that are often non-optimal for the surrounding environment. The Sun-Tracking Solar-Powered LED Street Lamp is a self-sustaining device, built to replace the current lighting sources. The device features sun-tracking capabilities for maximum energy gathering and darkness recognition to establish optimal operation times. The project provides a reliable and enhanced alternative to current street lighting systems.

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 …

Drum Sense: Smart Drum Set, Azra Skeljo

Electrical Engineering

I would like to propose a SMART drum set: a 5-piece acrylic LED drum set with 2 strips of adhesive RGB LEDs under each rim of every drum. Current SMART drum sets are very expensive and come as installable light rings that are attached on the outside of the drum instead of the inside. I have successfully prototyped 1 Floor Tom of the complete set. The LEDs are connected an AC to DC power converter via a six pin MIDI connector and Arduino. The drum set is characterized with a single RGB microcontroller, 5 sets of 150 LEDs, a piezoelectric …

Hydromodus: An Autonomous Underwater Vehicle, Alex Kost, Anu Mahinkanda, Jordan Read

Electrical Engineering

Hydromodus is a student-led multidisciplinary project conceived by Jordan Read designed to provide a low-cost modular hardware and software solution for researchers and scientists. For the scope of the Senior Project class, it is designed to be a baited remote underwater vehicle (BRUV), but the platform is highly modifiable and open-source.

Enterprise Smart Outlet, David Faltmier, Matthew Mcgill, Luke Stencel

Electrical Engineering

The purpose of our senior project, Enterprise Smart Outlet, is to create an electrical outlet which will allow enterprise users to monitor and change their power consumption habits on a large scale. The initial goal of this project is to allow consumers to see their power consumption per outlet in real time, and then using that information conform their future habits to help them conserve electrical energy, and more importantly, money. Three requirements for our project to meet our initial goal are, the outlet will work in a standard electrical outlet and be completely compatible with current electrical standards, the …

Shark Alert: Early Warning System, Cory Peterson, Marc Rauschnot, Taylor Mcclain

Electrical Engineering

The Shark Alert Early Warning System is a device geared toward avid beach goers such as surfers, divers, and swimmers. The system is composed of an ultrasonic transmitter mounted on a shark’s dorsal fin and a receiver worn by the user around the ankle. The receiver alerts the user to the presence of a shark upon ultrasonic signal detection.

The receiver warns the user through both visual and tactile (vibration) alerts to ensure user notification. This circuit was built and tested in the EE labs and Recreation Center pools to determine transmission range. The receiver detects the transmitted signal up …

U-Larm Bike Lock Accessory, Craig Cary

Electrical Engineering

Over the past few years, anti-pollution organizations and activists have encouraged society to use eco-friendly transportation like ride-sharing and biking. According to the San Luis Obispo Police Department, however, bike owners report approximately 269 bike thefts per year. This statistic illustrates the need for a more effective way to protect bicycle property.

The development of an alarm system for the U-Lock bike lock encourages bike owners to ride their bicycles by providing them with additional measures to protect their bicycle property. This U-Lock accessory, when cut, sounds an alarm to alert nearby persons of the theft-in-progress. In order to turn …

Smart Shot: Electronic Target With Smartphone Application, Tyler Stuart Pickett, Taylor Jacob Hutchinson

Electrical Engineering

The objective of this project is to develop an electronic system for recreational shooters that functions as a target with real-time feedback. The system provides a user-friendly alternative to paper targets and expensive competition scoring systems. One of the largest challenges presented by this project is balancing cost, durability, and sensitivity. The scope of this project includes the design and implementation of a target assembly, an electronic system, and a smartphone application.

The system is comprised of three main modules: the target, the control module, and the smartphone app. The electronic target communicates wirelessly with the smartphone via Bluetooth. Once …

Rocket Cam: Low Frequency Analog Transmission Of Digital Video, Thomas J. Higdon

Electrical Engineering

The camera module provides data for improving models of dynamic events on Orbital ATK Corp. rockets and aids in troubleshooting, if necessary. Video images provide a valuable addition to the strain, vibration, shock, and acoustic data used for modeling dynamic events, such as stage separations. The cameras can record a duration of video data suitable for capturing a dynamic event and of high enough quality to aid in its modeling. The module readily integrates into the rocket’s current analog data collection systems. The project has further relevance to any other application that necessitates video data transmission over similar limited-bandwidth, analog …

Current Protection For The Energy Harvesting From Exercise Machines (Ehfem) Project, Colton Crivelli

Electrical Engineering

The Energy Harvesting from Exercise Machines (EHFEM) project intends to create an exercise machine that recycles the energy expended by an athlete operating the machine by sending it to the electric grid. The work done by the user goes through a DC-DC converter and an inverter in order to prepare it for delivery to the grid. A protection circuit ensures that the inverter does not try to pull too much current from the DC-DC converter. The project implements a current protection system that ensures the system doesn’t experience an overcurrent condition.

The Dc House Project: Electrical System Design & Construction, John Bradley

Electrical Engineering

This project entails the design and assembly of the photovoltaic system, switchboard panel enclosure, and battery enclosure for the DC House’s main electrical system. The intended purpose of this project is to provide the electrical framework necessary for future students to easily modify and add to this rendition of the DC House. The principle design implements a variety of renewable energy sources, however this senior project only uses solar power in order to maintain a manageable scope. Each of these renewable energy sources are stepped down to a voltage of 24V and input to a Multi Input Single Output DC …

Dual Channel Matrix Switch Audio Receiver, Austin Fox

Electrical Engineering

The Dual Channel Matrix Switch Audio Receiver controls 2 separate audio output channels. Each channel plays any of the system's 3 inputs. This controller enables a user to play two separate audio signals through two separate speaker channels. The system design allows audio input from 2 RCA sources or 1 RCA source and a phono source. The system outputs an audio signal for each output simultaneously at up to 36W on each channel for an 8Ω load. The device allows a user to control the audio input and the volume of each output channel. An Arduino Uno R3 microcontroller interfaced …

Fluid Midi Ribbon Guitar, Noah Baker

Electrical Engineering

This project was developed to create a new electronic instrument based off of a guitar. The design will give the user more chord combinations than are available on a typical guitar, the ability to retune each “string”, and customizable MIDI controller outputs, while trying to retain a similar playing style. The initial design for this project included implementing an onboard synthesizer (analog or digital). This idea was scrapped for time and cost considerations and replaced with MIDI output which will yield user customizable sound through virtual instruments, such as Massive.

Iocean Rgb Sensor, Mark Mcneff, Archit Mendiratta

Electrical Engineering

The goal of this project is to create an accurate ocean color sensor that will communicate effectively with an iPhone. The device will take ocean color measurements at its current location and provide these measurements to the user for scientific study of the variability of ocean color across the globe. The data gathered by the device will also provide ground-truthing of satellite ocean color measurements.