EECS 398 & EECS 399

Senior Project I & II

Potential Projects

• Planetarium Display
  

  The Cleveland Museum of Natural History has a PLC controlled star display in the lobby of their planetarium. Basically, the PLC controls a user interface and then operates relays which switch optical fibers on and off to simulate a star display for each month of the year. A previous senior project has redesigned the user interface and the optical switches. What remains is to re-program the Rockwell PLC to implement the user display and the optical switches. This project is contingent on being able to get software to re-program the existing PLC.
  (Contact Prof. Merat, EECS)

• Rehabilative robotics, computer games, and more
  

  There are a number of opportunities for students to work in software development, robotics, EEG signal acquisition and signal processing, etc. at the Vetran's Administration Hospital. Previous projects have worked with computer software for rehabilative therapy. In this process the arms of patients needing rehabilitation have been attached to robots which then interact with them to exercise the appropriate muscles. The usewr interface looks like a computer game. In one example, the patient operates his arms to make a computer cursor track a path drawn on the screen and gets points for how accurately and quickly he can follow the computer drawn path. (Contact Dr. Janis Daly, jjd17@cwru.edu)

• Wireless Surface Network Mission Scenario and Simulation
  

  We have received a NASA contract to research and develop new protocols for NASA to use Internet protocols for communications among sensors, robots, autonomous and manned remote exploration vehicles, habitats, orbital resources and the like while conducting lunar or Martian exploration. We would like to design several simple mission scenarios and then design simulations to determine how well they work. The mission scenario can be very simple: how can two mobile robots which have access to several different communications capabilities stay in touch with each other while encountering obstacles which prohibit line of sight communications. The primary goal would be reliability with secondary goals of power efficiency and the like. On the other hand, a more complex scenario might require shifting priorities between available communications resources to handle astronaut VoIP requirements or even emergencies.
  (Contact Prof. Merat, EECS)

• ATA over Ethernet
  

  This is for a local company and represents a very low-level SAN solution, embedding disk drive ATA commands and data blocks in Ethernet frames. It is Ethernet level only - no IP or anything, but that's fine since it is intended for local storage - routing and such are not needed. Basically, you can create network devices that look like unix block devices. You can then do straight-forward filesystems and such over the network, or do software based RAIDs. With gigabit Ethernet so cheap now, it can be pretty fast and cheap. No fiber channel expense or the expense/complexity of iSCSI. We have an embedded PPC processor board that might be a good fit for making an ATA over Ethernet device. The project would be to implement the protocol on this board. The standard is only 8 pages long, so the bulk of the work would be in the embedded device drivers. A better implementation would be to do this on an FPGA but that is for a future project - there are open cores available for both the Ethernet MAC and the ATA controller. That would require someone that is pretty familiar with VHDL or Verilog. Here's a link to the protocol: http://www.coraid.com/documents/AoEr8.txt
  (Contact Nick Barendt, nickbarendt@gmail.com)

• Water level sensor
  

  We have been working for several semesters on a device which can be attached to the existing water level sight class of a commercial furnace or boiler. We have used a Motorola MC33791 e-field sensor to capacitely sense the level of water in tubes, and have independently used a microprocessor to send messages through an attached modem to one of the cell phone providers. The messages are sent using the TAPS protocol. The project still needs a lot of work. The hardware have never been completely integrated onto one printed circuit board and the design of a printed circuit implementation needs to be done. In addition to the hardware aspects, the software for the integrated system needs to be designed and implemented. This software would need to be able to process signals from the capacitive sensors and has both calibration and signal processing requirements. Finally, the current capacitive sensing method has limitations and we may need to research other sensors and design experiments to test their effectiveness.
  (Contact Prof. Merat, EECS)

• Wireless Networked Gun Target Actuation System
  

  A need exists for the development of wireless networked target actuation system such as is used for shooter training and practice. The actuator would be required to rotate a target 90° from a horizontal orientation to a vertical orientation for a pre-programmed period of time and then return the target to its initial position. The system must also be able to sense the impact of the round and drop the target when the target is struck. The system should be able to support a minimum of 10 actuators that can be accessed from a computer (preferably a laptop) over a wireless network (preferably 802.11 compliant). The system should be able to operate over a maximum distance of 300 yards from the base station to the furthest actuator. It is envisioned that the actuators would be laid out on the shooting range at distances from 5 to 300 yards from the firing point. The software would recognize the actuators and assign each an ID that would appear on the computer display. The user would then program the actuators for the amount of exposure time and hide time for each target and the total number of target exposures. These times are typically on the order of 5 seconds. The actuators would themselves require an on-board microprocessor to control the actuation mechanism, arbitrate communications and keep track of scoring. Scoring can performed in one of two modes. Mode 1 would score solely based on the number target impacts. Mode 2 would score using a time/distance based bias method in that the maximum point score can be obtained only within the first 2 seconds of exposure and decreasing thereafter until the target drops at the end of the exposure period. In addition, the software would allow the targets to be configured such that certain targets can be assigned a higher point score, such as those at further distances. The actuators must be designed to operate from a battery, and the design should be such that it maximizes operational time between battery recharges. The actuators must able to operate for a minimum of 100 actuations over a time period of five hours.
  

  This project would concentrate upon the development of a target impact sensing mechanism, implementation of the wireless networking, software development for both the remote actuators as well as the base station. It is anticipated that a significant portion of the project can be implemented with commercial off the shelf (COTS) components.
  

  (Contact Mr. Mark Podany, mpodany@pgmdi.com)
  

  
  

• Adso the Librarian
  

  This is a project for a local start-up company. There are numerous software packages for the management of digital photos (e.g., Apple iPhoto, Adobe Photoshop Album, iView Media Pro, etc.) There is, however, currently no robust cross-platform software available for the management of scanned files and images, and other user-created/user-acquired (UCUA) documents.
  

  A functional prototype database has been developed to perform simple search routines to locate UCUA journal articles, and searches can be performed by Author, by Journal, by Year, by Keyword, etc. The user was responsible for hand-coding this bibliographic information into the database, and linking this information to the electronic file. Adobe Acrobat Forms was used to re-capture this bibliographic information, and attach it to the electronic file. This functional prototype was developed in 4D for the Apple Gx platform.
  

  This functional prototype needs fundamental and evolutionary enhancements. The company desires the following tasks: (1) evaluation of similar/competitive products, identifying strengths and weaknesses; (2) improved search capabilities, possibly including GREP-style features; (3) data import/export capability; (4) duplicate entry management and internal data synchronization; (5) improved GUI (company will assist/develop/provide artwork to support); (6) streamlined data entry process; (7) cross-platform support (MAC/PC); (8) document preview; and (9) interface to other databases (e.g., Lexis-Nexis, SilverPlatter, etc.).
  

  This will be a classic "real-world" design engineering project, with project management, design plan and schedule, design specifications, design activities and design reviews, design verification, design validation, and design documentation. The company seeks excellence in design and design documentation.
  

  (Contact James J. Rogers, Coastal Consulting Group, Ltd. coastalcg@earthlink.net)