VLSI and Circuits, Embedded and Hardware Systems Commons^™

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 …

Automatic Cat Caretaker, Connor Mcclenathan, Ryan Anderson, Andrew Tate

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

This project will involve developing and constructing a self-cleaning litter box with feeding and watering functions attached. The machine will have a user interface for setting both the feeding and watering times, as well as how much to fill the food and water bowls at the same time. The project will involve the use of motors for the cleaning, feeding, and watering functions, sensors to detect when to perform those functions, and a microcontroller to process all the data and to tell the motors when to perform their respective functions. This project's goal is to make the task of caring …

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 …

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 …

Dashboard, Bradley Manuel Levin, Kyle Matthew King

Computer Engineering

Modern gamers are always looking for new and exciting ways to play board games. Our senior project, DashBoard, is intended to capitalize on this interest and upgrade board games to have pre-programmed moves and easy piece moving. It is a proof-of-concept project for a programmable chess-style game board using an electromagnet array to move the pieces around the board. With an easily programmable interface with the Raspberry Pi 3, users can make their own programs or find ones others have made online to move pieces in creative ways.

Electronic Drum Machine (E.D.M), Nyssa Marie Backes

Electrical Engineering

Many people argue that a drummer plays the most important role in a band of any genre. During live performances, the other band members rely on the drummer to keep the song moving forward at a proper steady pace. Even in recorded music, drums help listeners sing and dance along with their favorite songs. Thus, achieving success as a band, both in terms of recordings and live shows, absolutely requires a drummer. So, if a band does not have a drummer, and cannot afford the hefty cost of hiring a session drummer, a touring drummer, or both, how can they …

Design And Analysis Of An Asynchronous Microcontroller, Michael Hinds

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation presents the design of the most complex MTNCL circuit to date. A fully functional MTNCL MSP430 microcontroller is designed and benchmarked against an open source synchronous MSP430. The designs are compared in terms of area, active energy, and leakage energy. Techniques to reduce MTNCL pipeline activity and improve MTNCL register file area and power consumption are introduced. The results show the MTNCL design to have superior leakage power characteristics. The area and active energy comparisons highlight the need for better MTNCL logic synthesis techniques.

Wirelessly Connected Sensor Acquisition System For Remote Nursing Applications, Yuhua Hu

Dissertations, Theses and Capstone Projects (Full IR Collection)

Taking advantage of the equipment used in the "Remote Nursing" project, nurses can watch patients' status remotely. The equipment, which is installed in the patient's ward or home, can monitor them and their environment. This project demonstrates this using a microcontroller system that interfaces to a video camera and temperature and humidity sensors in the room. Also a servomotor is installed to control the position of the camera. The microcontroller communicates wirelessly with a PC.

This project is focused on hardware rather than software. It is to test the video camera and sensors being used over the microcontroller through the …

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.

Wd Data Aquisition Board, Charmaine Guintu

Electrical Engineering

The Data Acquisition (DAQ) Board project is a continuation of a project that started last year. It is a project in collaboration with Western Digital. Western Digital (WD) Power LSI Systems Validation group has stress testing equipment called the Torture Stand. Inside the Torture Stand hard drives are compacted and tested until failure. However, the transient responses of voltage and current signals from the hard drives are currently obtained from oscilloscopes. The oscilloscopes are bulky and expensive, so to replace the oscilloscopes the DAQ was created. The small size and much cheaper cost of the DAQ allows Western Digital to …

Modernizing The Microcontroller Laboratory With Low-Cost And Open-Source Tools, Kenneth J. Hass, Juliana Su

Faculty Conference Papers and Presentations

No abstract provided.

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.

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 …

Keyboard - Smart Card Reader Controller Using Vhdl, Lani Mohd Zuwairi

Student Works (2000-2009)

As the time fly by the technology of computers has improves and much security is needed in every transaction of data that being done. In this project, designing a microcontroller for keyboard and smart card reader terminal integration is being done. At first stage, the architecture of the controller will analyze and studied. This will need some practice of knowledge in computer organization and architecture, as well as microprocessors architecture designs. Then the architecture is design using hardware prototyping. This is by using the VHSIC Hardware Description Language (VHDL). The codes done using the language then being simulate to get …