VLSI and Circuits, Embedded and Hardware Systems Commons^™

Continuous Hand-Tool Leveling Device, Shaun Villa Koide

Electrical Engineering

To produce clean and precise cuts, hand-tools (e.g. knives and saws) must maintain a consistent angle of orientation during the entire cutting process. The Continuous Hand-Tool Leveling Device mounts on the desired hand-tool and the user inputs the desired angle of the cutting plane. The device utilizes a microcontroller unit (MCU) and accelerometer to implement real-time angle measurement. When using a hand-tool, the device uses an LED that indicates that the hand-tool’s angle deviates from the user-set desired angle, which prevents any potential mistakes from occurring due to user error. The device easily mounts on many common cutting tools. Additionally, …

Low Voltage Cmos Sar Adc Design, Ryan Hunt

Electrical Engineering

This project centers on the design of a single ended 10-bit successive approximation register analog to digital converter (SAR ADC for short) that easily interfaces to a micro-controller, such as an Arduino. With micro-controller interfacing in mind, the universal data transfer technique of SPI proved an easy way to communicate between the ADC and the micro-controller. The ADC has a range of 1V (highest code value) to 0V (lowest code value) and operates from a single voltage rail value of 1.8V. Typical SPI clock speeds run on the order of 2MHz and with a 10-bit ADC this means a sampling …

Real Time Swim Instructor, Konrad Antoniuk

Electrical Engineering

Both competitive and recreational swimmers want an efficient swim stroke but often lack consistent feedback with technical insight. Competitive swimmers rely on coaches for instruction but have to stop swimming to listen. The Real Time Swim Instructor project provides live feedback to a swimmer so they can feel their stroke correction while they’re swimming. The developing swimmer feels the difference between correct and incorrect form instantaneously.

The project takes on the responsibility of measuring the moving body, accurately determining stroke improvement, functioning under water, and providing recognizable feedback. Additionally, the user can review their swim from data stored in memory. …

Bike Safe: An Automatic Turn Signal System, Betty He Chan, Ricardo Alberto Duran

Electrical Engineering

Bicycles are vehicles that do not require a license to operate and share the road with cars, motorcycles, and other fast moving vehicles. An improper lane change from a bicyclist, such as one without any warning, can lead to great injury or death (especially after sundown). Bike Safe addresses this safety concern by providing a low-cost device that mimics the warning system motorists’ use every day. The system consists of a red brake light and amber turning signal lights that mounts to the rear of the bike, as well as a white headlamp that mounts to the front handlebars. The …

Ad-Hoc Hid: Modular Wireless Human Interface Device, Joseph A. Mazzanti

Electrical Engineering

Ad-Hoc HID is a modular, reprogrammable Human Interface Device. This device is intended to function as a keyboard, gamepad, or mouse, according to the user's needs. The final project is intended to be switch agnostic, making the final product adaptable to the user’s needs.

Imu Based Tracking And Stabilization System, Aaron Barton

Electrical Engineering

The objective of this project is to develop a system that can track a user selected point in space given displacement, vibration and rotation of the device. Stabilization systems are used in various forms over the years, with the military amongst the foremost adopters. More recently, with the increasing popularity of quad-copters for RC hobbyists, and small cameras capable of take high quality video during recreational sports such as skiing or mountain biking, the need has emerged for a cheaper, more accessible version of stabilization systems for use in photography. Additionally, while some devices do exist for hobbyists can take …

Poly_Sense: Modular Wireless Sensor Network, Ian Andal, James Shirley, Haleigh Vierra

Electrical Engineering

Poly_Sense provides a platform for developers to use for a wide range of Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) applications. This modular system supports different sensing applications by allowing the developer to easily change between supported sensors through the graphical user interface (GUI). The platform also allows developers to integrate new sensors by writing device drivers which follow the platform’s guidelines and utilize the application programming interface (API). This low-power and cost-effective wireless solution not only provides a basic platform for entry-level developers, but also accommodates larger-scale applications.

Monophonic Pitch Recognition, Nathan Zorndorf, Kristine Carreon

Electrical Engineering

The purpose of this project is to create a system that automatically converts monophonic music into its MIDI equivalent. Automatic pitch recognition allows for numerous commercial applications, including automatic transcription and digital storage of live performances. It is also desirable to be able to take an audio signal as an input and create a MIDI equivalent score because the MIDI information can be used to replace the original audio signal sounds with any sound the user would like. For example, if a piano composition is entered into the system, the resulting MIDI out could be used to trigger guitar samples. …

Lyfi, Kianoosh Salami, Justin Cotton, Elush Shirazpour

Electrical Engineering

This paper will cover the steps necessary to design, build, and manage networkable smart light switches over WiFi via a mobile application. It contains a microcontroller running a real time operating system, a WiFi module, a Java server with SQLite databasing, and a mobile phone application.

LyFi is designed to turn on/off and dim household lights while only requiring the same installation procedure as a less capable dimmer switch. Once installed and connected to a network, LyFi will self-discover and configure. The server automatically propogates a database of nodes where any mobile device running an application can receive an updated …

Control System For Glucose Detector System, David Smith

Electrical Engineering

In this paper I design and test on a prove of concept level a control/timing circuit for a blood glucose detector built in a previous senior project. The specifications of the design given are to properly power the detector with a low power source. The design is completed on a transistor level basis using Cadence Virtuoso Software. The system is design from the ground up; designing, building, and testing smaller circuits first then combined into increasingly larger circuits till the completed circuit is finished. The design used to based off of the 555 Timer and uses differential pairs, CMOS designed …

Iphone Breathalyzer: Point Oh Wait!, Gurpal Bhoot

Electrical Engineering

This final year project combines hardware and software components to create an alcohol breathalyzer that is compatible with the iPhone. The final design of the circuit and the iPhone application is original and combines multiple components to create the final product. Most of those components are seen in a simplified version of a breathalyzer, while the added components take care of the interface to the iPhone.

Foce Intermodule Communications System, Roland Quiros

Electrical Engineering

Done in conjunction with Chad Kecy of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Reasearch Institute (MBARI), this project is an expansion of the Free Ocean Carbon Emission (FOCE) project. This iteration created a communications protocol between the different modules in an expandable array of PIC24-based boards.

Auto-Tuning Antenna, John Chen, Jennifer Tighe

Electrical Engineering

Radio transmitters and antennas have differing impedances at the output and feedpoint, depending on frequency. Modern antenna tuning methods involve manual or automatic resistance and reactance network adjustment to match transmitter and antenna impedance. This reduces power reflections to the transmitter, but introduces losses and prevents full transmitter power from being radiated at the antenna. This project utilizes a variable length antenna element to tune and match transmitter and antenna impedances, allowing efficient power transfer to the antenna. The antenna length varies from 0 to 30.5 inches. The method involves an RF signal with a maximum power of 2 watts …

Discrete Alarm Clock, Travis Moore, Collin Barth

Electrical Engineering

The standard alarm clock, as used daily by millions worldwide, has clear room for modification and improvement.  This paper documents an implementation that rectifies many of these flaws.  Improvements include adjustable snooze length, an IR remote for ease of use, and an RF headset for discrete alarm use or potential incorporation into a device much like a hearing aid.  The processes involved in creating a digital alarm clock, as well as the obstacles met in the implementation of the enhanced design, are detailed within.

Mp3 Player System Design, Eric Wu

Electrical Engineering

The purpose of this project is to design and build a portable audio player that reads music files off an SD card, decodes the music file and outputs the music through a headphone jack.  A microcontroller running FreeRTOS will facilitate the data transfer between an SD card and the decoding chip.  The decoded audio will then be sent to a high-end DAC chip that outputs the sound.

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.

Controller Board Prototype Development For The Cal Poly Super Project, Clifford Susa

Electrical Engineering

Now in phase two of development, the Cal Poly Sustainable Power for Electrical Reources (SuPER) project will provide power to families for an estimated lifespan of 20 years at a cost of $500. Phase two of the SuPER project looks at implementing microcontrollers to monitor the health and status of the system. This senior project looks specifically at the performances of the SuPER Controller which communicates with the SuPER Digitizer to gather data such as voltage, current, temperature, and power. An SD memory card will store this data, and to view this data, then download to a PC.

Multicore, Multithreaded, Phase-Synchronous Fm Sound Synthesizer, Justin Tomlin

Electrical Engineering

This project implements a phase-synchronous FM synthesis algorithm in hardware.  Envelope and low frequency oscillator modulation of oscillator parameters is implemented.  The microcontroller the system is based on, the XMOS XS1-G4, allows for physical parallelism including features such as multiple cores, multiple hardware threads on each core, a hardware event-driven thread scheduler, and channel, channel ends, and link switches for thread and core communication.  The event-driven architecture of this device was ideal for implementing this synthesis algorithm.  The final product is portable, durable, has a simple, intuitive user interface, and allows for extensive spectral shaping capabilities.  The basic functional requirements …

Polyenvi, Stephen Beard, Josh Engel, Paul Fake, Diego Flores, Alvaro Nunez, Miguel Wong

Electrical Engineering

Poor indoor air quality is a problem that is recognized by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to cause health issues. In order to raise awareness of this problem, this document outlines the construction of a device that economically measures air quality through five metrics: dust, smoke, ozone, humidity, and temperature. The device integrates with a router to provide users access to information about their indoor air quality anywhere over the internet as well as local access to the data via an LCD mounted on the router. By increasing indoor air quality awareness, this device will aid users in making adjustments …

High Contrast Grayscale Object Tracking Embedded System Design, Scott Donald Neally

Electrical Engineering

The purpose of this project is to prove that a real-time object-tracking camera can be implemented using the Digilent NEXYS board with Xilinx Platform Studio. With great ambition I set to implement the camera with RGB color tracking of bright green objects. This would make segmentation between the object of interest and its background much easier, allowing less stringent requirements on the background color beyond the object. Because of time restraints, the actual implementation remains as 8-bit grayscale, where the object of interest is intended to be white and highly contrasted from its black background. A simple algorithm is used …