Signal Processing Commons^™

Instrumented Control Column For Optionally Piloted Aircraft, Andrew J. Klein

Electrical Engineering

Natilus, an aerospace company that is rapid-prototyping optionally piloted aircraft (OPA) for the shipping industry, needs a system that retrieves control column position data in order to manipulate flight simulator parameters in software. At present, a universally compatible system for all aircraft does not exist. Typically, established aerospace companies will sink significant time and money into developing proprietary systems for control column data retrieval as every aircraft is unique in its layout and linkage design. However, as a startup developing their first aircraft, Natilus does not have the privilege of modifying an existing sensor system to work with their HIL …

Indoor Positioning Using Synchronized Ultrasonic Ofdma Signals, Julian Bartolone

Master's Theses

This paper proposes a method of short-range indoor localization using differential phase measurements of synchronized two-tone ultrasonic signals in an Orthogonal Frequency Multiple Access (OFDMA) scheme. This indoor positioning system (IPS) operates at an ultrasonic frequency of approximately 40kHz and synchronizes using an infrared signal. The OFDMA scheme allows for a receiver to process the signals from multiple transmitters continuously without the signals interfering with each other. The phases of the signals are measured using Goertzel Filters, allowing for low-complexity frequency content analysis. A MATLAB simulation using the proposed localization method is performed using four transmitter nodes in the corners …

An Exploratory Study Of Pulse Width And Delta Sigma Modulators, Logan B. Penrod

Master's Theses

This paper explores the noise shaping and noise producing qualities of Delta-Sigma Modulators (DSM) and Pulse-Width Modulators (PWM). DSM has long been dominant in the Delta Sigma Analog-to-Digital Converter (DSADC) as a noise-shaped quantizer and time discretizer, while PWM, with a similar self oscillating structure, has seen use in Class D Power Amplifiers, performing a similar function. It has been shown that the PWM in Class D Amplifiers outperforms the DSM [1], but could this advantage be used in DSADC use-cases? LTSpice simulation and printed circuit board implementation and test are used to present data on four variations of these …

Indoor Positioning Using Acoustic Pseudo-Noise Based Time Difference Of Arrival, Nicholas J. Luong

Master's Theses

The Global Positioning System (GPS) provides good precision on a global scale, but is not suitable for indoor applications. Indoor positioning systems (IPS) aim to provide high precision position information in an indoor environment. IPS has huge market opportunity with a growing number of commercial and consumer applications especially as Internet of Things (IoT) develops. This paper studies an IPS approach using audible sound and pseudo-noise (PN) based time difference of arrival (TDoA). The system’s infrastructure consists of synchronized speakers. The object to be located, or receiver, extracts TDoA information and uses multilateration to calculate its position. The proposed IPS …

Distance Estimation Using Ofdm Signals For Ultrasonic Positioning, Kyman Huang

Master's Theses

This paper describes a method of estimating distance via Time-of-Flight (TOF) measurement using ultrasonic Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) signals. Using OFDM signals allows the signals and their sub-carriers to remain orthogonal to each other while continuously transmitting. This estimation method is based on the change of phase of a traveling wave as it propagates through a medium (air for ultrasonic signals). By using signals containing multiple tones, the phase change between each frequency component is slightly different. This phase difference is dependent on the distance traveled and can thus be used to estimate distance. This paper studies the impact …

The Design, Testing, And Analysis Of A Constant Jammer For The Bluetooth Low Energy (Ble) Wireless Communication Protocol, Aiku Shintani

Master's Theses

The decreasing cost of web-enabled smart devices utilizing embedded processors, sensors, and wireless communication hardware have created an optimal ecosystem for the Internet of Things (IoT). IEEE802.15.4, IEEE802.11ah, WirelessHART, ZigBee Smart Energy, Bluetooth (BT), and Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) are amongst the most commonly used wireless standards for IoT systems. Each of these standards has tradeoffs concerning power consumption, range of communication, network formation, security, reliability, and ease of implementation. The most widely used standards for IoT are Bluetooth, BLE, and Zigbee. This paper discusses the vulnerabilities in the implementation of the PHY and link layers of BLE. The link …

Development Of A Myoelectric Detection Circuit Platform For Computer Interface Applications, Nickolas Andrew Butler

Master's Theses

Personal computers and portable electronics continue to rapidly advance and integrate into our lives as tools that facilitate efficient communication and interaction with the outside world. Now with a multitude of different devices available, personal computers are accessible to a wider audience than ever before. To continue to expand and reach new users, novel user interface technologies have been developed, such as touch input and gyroscopic motion, in which enhanced control fidelity can be achieved. For users with limited-to-no use of their hands, or for those who seek additional means to intuitively use and command a computer, novel sensory systems …

3d Signal Strength Mapping Of 2.4ghz Wifi Networks, Brett D. Glidden

Electrical Engineering

Many commercial businesses operate out of multi-story office buildings. These companies often use many Wi-Fi access points to set up their own wireless network. IT personnel determine proper Wi-Fi access point placement using Wi-Fi strength maps. Conventional Wi-Fi strength maps only provide a two-dimensional view representing the wireless access point's effective range. The signal quality and strength measurements do not include changing vertical elevation. Efficient network layout in a multi-story building requires a system calculating signal quality metrics in three dimensions.

This project involves designing and prototyping a system to achieve 2.4GHz Wi-Fi signal quality measurements in a three-dimensional reference …

The Design, Building, And Testing Of A Constant On Discreet Jammer For The Ieee 802.15.4/Zigbee Wireless Communication Protocol, Alexandre J. Marette

Master's Theses

As wireless protocols become easier to implement, more products come with wireless connectivity. This latest push for wireless connectivity has left a gap in the development of the security and the reliability of some protocols. These wireless protocols can be used in the growing field of IoT where wireless sensors are used to share information throughout a network. IoT is being implemented in homes, agriculture, manufactory, and in the medical field. Disrupting a wireless device from proper communication could potentially result in production loss, security issues, and bodily harm. The 802.15.4/ZigBee protocol is used in low power, low data rate, …

Two Senior Projects: 2.4 Ghz, 40% Efficiency Radio Frequency Amplifier, Ieee Design Contest, & Design And Implementation Of A Software Costas Loop For Audio Frequencies, Robert J. Tong

Electrical Engineering

How to Read this Document:

This document combines two senior project reports. The first senior project documents designing a class AB RF amplifier. The second, discusses the design and implementation of a software Costas loop for audio frequencies. The first report begins on the next page, while the Costas loop report starts on page 24. The two reports are orthogonal from one another. It is not a prerequisite to read the RF amplifier report before reading the Costas loop report. This document is merely two reports combined into one document. The second report, about the Costas loop, was written as …

The Following Robot, Juan D. Cerda, Matthew S. Kwan, Vi M. Le

Computer Engineering

The objective of this project is to design, build, and test an autonomous robot with an associated Android application. The robot uses on board inertial measurement sensors (magnetometer, accelerometer, gyroscope) and coordinates itself through Bluetooth communication with the similar built­in measurement sensors on the Android phone to mimic and follow movement. The Following Robot incorporates the same basic movement functionality as a typical RC car. The robot follows the user’s phone through an application on one’s phone. This application accesses the phone’s accelerometer and gyroscope data and translates into appropriate conversions. Methods of tracking and calculating distance or angular displacement …

Hands On, Michael Le, Justin Remulla, Chris Menezes, Noah Beilin

Electrical Engineering

The goal is to design an extremely articulate smart glove, which acts a virtual reality controller. The smart glove will have gesture detection, which could include hand movements and/or combinations of finger movements to emulate mouse click or scroll, or digitally map out a hand for integrations with virtually reality softwares. This glove will have multiple accelerometer sensors on each finger and joint, connected to a single board running BLE MCU SoC in order to communicate with computer or mobile devices. The glove would connect to devices such as computers or phones using a Bluetooth dongle with applications in virtual …

Verification Of Receiver Equalization By Integrating Dataflow Simulation And Physical Channels, David M. Ritter, Tina Smilkstein

Master's Theses

This thesis combines Keysight’s SystemVue software with a Vector Signal Analyzer (VSA) and Vector Signal Generator (VSG) to test receiver equalization schemes over physical channels. The testing setup, “Equalization Verification,” is intended to be able to evaluate any equalization scheme over any physical channel, and a decision-directed feed-forward LMS equalizer is used as an example. The decision-directed feed-forward LMS equalizer is shown to decrease the BER from 10^-2 to 10^-3 (average of all trials) over a CAT7 and CAT6A cable, both simulated and physical, for 1GHz and 2GHz carrier, and 80MHz data rate. A wireless channel, 2.4GHz Dipole …

Thermal Evolution Of Moon, Arshdeep Singh Gill

Master's Theses

In August, 2014 three experiments were conducted using infrared systems deployed at White Mountain Research center, CA. The data was acquired for the whole month of August. Teams of 3-4 students from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and UC Santa Barbara were stationed at the research center for 2-3 days to operate the equipment. The three experiments were:(1) creating spatial-temporal time series of lunar surface temperatures;(2) identifying atmospheric meteor trails;(3) search for meteor impacts on the Moon surface. Out of the three this thesis focusses on experiment 1 and the results from this experiment could also help with the other …

Scaled Synthetic Aperture Rader Development, Jason Garvey Schray

Master's Theses

Several previous Cal Poly thesis projects involve synthetic aperture radar (SAR), automatic target recognition (ATR), and tracking. SAR data was either accessed from a publicly available database or generated using complex computer modeling software. The motivation for this dual thesis project is to design and construct a scaled SAR system to support Cal Poly radar projects. Ideally this is a low-cost, high resolution SAR architecture that produces raw range Doppler data for any desired target area. To that end, a scaled SAR system was successfully designed, built, and tested. The current SAR system, however, does not perform azimuthal compression and …

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 …

Analysis Of Various Algorithmic Approaches To Software-Based 1200 Baud Audio Frequency Shift Keying Demodulation For Aprs, Robert F. Campbell

Master's Theses

Digital communications continues to be a relevant Field of study as new technologies appear and old methodologies get revisited or renovated. The goal of this research is to look into the old digital communication scheme of Bell 202 [67] used by APRS and improve software based demodulation performance. Improved performance is defined by being able to correctly decode more packets in an efficient, real time, manner. Most APRS demodulation is currently done using specialized hardware since that yields the best performance. This research shows that through using Sivan Toledo's javAX25 [72] software package, new demodulation algorithms can be implemented that …

Real-Time Digital Effects Processing Using Ios, Jonah W. Clinard

Computer Engineering

In today’s society, we are seeing incredible improvements in terms of creating smaller technological devices that behave more and more like the personal computers of yesterday. Mobile “Smart” devices, in particular, are becoming incredibly powerful not just in terms of processing power, but in the fact that they are able to provide assistance to users in their everyday lives. Application developers are now able utilize the power and size of these devices, to create and realize ideas that would have been previously viewed as impossible. This project applies the fields of digital signal processing, music, and mobile application development, to …

Scaled Synthetic Aperture Radar System Development, Ryan K. Green

Master's Theses

Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) systems generate two dimensional images of a target area using RF energy as opposed to light waves used by cameras. When cloud cover or other optical obstructions prevent camera imaging over a target area, SAR can be substituted to generate high resolution images. Linear frequency modulated signals are transmitted and received while a moving imaging platform traverses a target area to develop high resolution images through modern digital signal processing (DSP) techniques. The motivation for this joint thesis project is to design and construct a scaled SAR system to support Cal Poly radar projects. Objectives include …

Synthetic Aperture Radar: Rapid Detection Of Target Motion In Matlab, Daniel S. Kassen

Master's Theses

Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) has come into widespread use in several civilian and military applications. The focus of this paper is the military application of imaging point targets captured by an airborne SAR platform. Using the traditional SAR method of determining target motion by analyzing the difference between subsequent images takes a relatively large amount of processing resources. Using methods in this thesis, target motion can be estimated before even a single image is obtained, reducing the amount of time and power used by a significantly large amount. This thesis builds on work done by Brain Zaharri and David So. …

Data Chunking In Quasi-Synchronous Ds-Cdma, Trevor Dalke

Master's Theses

DS-CDMA is a popular multiple access technique used in many mobile networks to efficiently share channel resources between users in a cell. Synchronization between users maximizes the user capacity of these systems. However, it is difficult to perfectly synchronize users in the reverse link due to the geographic diversity of mobile users in the cell. As a result, most commercial DS-CDMA networks utilize an asynchronous reverse link resulting in a reduced user capacity. A possible compromise to increase the user capacity in the reverse link is to implement a quasi-synchronous timing scheme, a timing scheme in which users are allowed …

Noise Reduction With Microphone Arrays For Speaker Identification, Zachary Gideon Cohen

Master's Theses

The presence of acoustic noise in audio recordings is an ongoing issue that plagues many applications. This ambient background noise is difficult to reduce due to its unpredictable nature. Many single channel noise reduction techniques exist but are limited in that they may distort the desired speech signal due to overlapping spectral content of the speech and noise. It is therefore of interest to investigate the use of multichannel noise reduction algorithms to further attenuate noise while attempting to preserve the speech signal of interest.

Specifically, this thesis looks to investigate the use of microphone arrays in conjunction with multichannel …

802.15.4 Low Intermediate Frequency Radio Receiver, Sanjay Avasarala

Electrical Engineering

This project involves the design, building, and testing of a low intermediate frequency 802.15.4 receiver that uses an FPGA to perform final demodulation to baseband.

Spectral Shape Division Multiplexing (Ssdm): Apparatus, Transmitter, Receiver And Detection, Fausto Daniel Holguín-Sánchez

Master's Theses

Wireless communication companies require to use the frequency spectrum to operate. Both frequency licenses and infrastructure to reuse frequencies are costly resources subject to increasing demand. This work introduces a novel multiplexing method that saves spectrum called Spectral Shape Division Multiplexing (SSDM). Under certain configurations, SSDM displays higher flexibility and throughput than other spectrally efficient methods.

SSDM defines the structure of a wireless multi-carrier by software. It is similar to Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) in that both use overlapped sub-carriers to make efficient use of allocated spectrum. However, SSDM has several advantages. Where OFDM organizes sub-carriers orthogonally, SSDM allows …

Laser Cursor, Michael Liman

Electrical Engineering

A user controls a cursor on a computer screen using a laser pointer. A camera picks up the laser pointer’s position and sends the data to the computer to move the cursor in the correct position.

Digital Modulations Using The Universal Software Radio Peripheral, Daniel Keith Artis

Electrical Engineering

Software defined radios (SDRs) are versatile systems that integrate hardware and software to create a reprogrammable wireless system. Due to the versatility and hardware requirements of a SDR, they are typically expensive and not always affordable for educational institutions. GNU Radio is a free software package that allows users to do signal processing on any computer using python and C++. Using the Universal Software Radio Peripheral (USRP) board in conjunction with a standard personal computer (PC), a RF daughterboard, and the GNU Radio software, we can create a software defined radio that can transmit, receive, and process signals. Because the …

Touch Screen Sound Controller, James Fenley, Jonathan Law

Electrical Engineering

The Touch Screen Sound Controller sets out to explore the use of a touch screen as a sound control interface for the disk jockey profession. In addition, the project aims to provide an alternate means of transferring audio data by way of TCP/IP communications as opposed to MIDI. By applying our method, a user may stream pulse-code modulated data from a server onto a client’s RAM via an Ethernet connection. A 32bit, 200MHz ARM9 microprocessor addresses data from the RAM and proceeds with executing DSP instructions from the user. The connection between the touch screen and the central microprocessor is …

Synthetic Aperture Radar Imaging Simulated In Matlab, Matthew Schlutz

Master's Theses

This thesis further develops a method from ongoing thesis projects with the goal of generating images using synthetic aperture radar (SAR) simulations coded in MATLAB. The project is supervised by Dr. John Saghri and sponsored by Raytheon Space and Airborne Systems. SAR is a type of imaging radar in which the relative movement of the antenna with respect to the target is utilized. Through the simultaneous processing of the radar reflections over the movement of the antenna via the range Doppler algorithm (RDA), the superior resolution of a theoretical wider antenna, termed synthetic aperture, is obtained. The long term goal …

Target Tracking Using Various Filters In Synthetic Aperture Radar Data And Imagery, Jessica L. Kiefer

Master's Theses

This thesis explores the use and accuracy of several discrete-time image filters for the purpose of target tracking in Synthetic Aperture Radar imagery. Both extended targets and point targets are used for tracking, showing the need for different types of filters for each target type.

Monte Carlo analysis is performed on the results of the extended target filter results to determine the absolute mean-squared error between the filter prediction of the target centroid and the actual location of the target centroid. Two different filters were chosen for the extended target: Kalman and H Infinity.

Both the Kalman and H Infinity …