Senior Design Project Summaries: 1988-1989

EE 461, 462, 463 Senior Design Project
Fall, Winter, and Spring Quarters 1988-1989

• Project #1: AUTO DIGITIZATION AND WORD RECOGNITION**
• Project #2: ELECTROCOACH HANDBOOK
• Project #3 GKY-1 INTERFACE SYSTEM FINAL REPORT
• Project #4: IMAGE DISPLAY PROCESSING PACKAGE
• Project #5: INTELLIGENT DATA ACQUISITION DEVICE*
• Project #6: MICROPROCESSOR-BASED ALARM CLOCK WITH STORED MESSAGE CAPABILITY*
• Project #7: OPTICAL FIBER TRANSMISSION SYSTEM**
• Project #8: PROM PROGRAMMER**
• Project #9: SINGLE-FIELD VIDEO DIGITIZER
• Project #10: STAND-ALONE ROBOT CONTROLLER**
• Project #11: STAND-ALONE VIDEO CAPTURE, DISPLAY AND PROCESSING UNIT
• Project #12: STARLAN**
• Project #13: TALKER
• Project #14: TRANSPUTER PROJECT
• Project #15: VIDEO DIGITIZER
• Project #16: VIDEO DIGITIZER/ENHANCER
• Project #17: VOICE DIGITIZATION SYSTEM**

Project #1: AUTO DIGITIZATION AND WORD RECOGNITION**

By: Roger Sjoberg and Danial Bieniek
Advisor: Dr. R. A. Higgins
Description: The project involved the use of A/D converters to digitize speech signals with FFT analysis to characterize the signals for command recognition. A program to run on a PC was designed and trained to recognize several voice commands, with the decoded words output on a display.

Project #2: ELECTROCOACH HANDBOOK

By: Lance Mason and Daniel Miller
Advisor:
Description: The Electrocoach is a completely portable data acquisition unit, built especially for use by endurance athletes. Its function is to store sensor-obtained data in its on-board memory for later usage in a data plotting PC program. Special features of the design include the capability for 16 sensor outputs, 8 different voltage ranges for handling various sensor outputs, automatic and manual sampling, adjustable sampling rate, 256k bytes of memory, and complete programmability with the aid of a hand-held terminal. This unit is capable of storing as many tests as will fit in the memory space.

Project #3 GKY-1 INTERFACE SYSTEM FINAL REPORT

By: Kevin Kepros, Peter Yates, and Douglas Gifford
Advisor: Dr. B. W. Ellis
Description: This project involved design, development, and construction of a General Purpose Interface Bus (GPIB) System, including a board that plugs directly into an 8-bit I/O expansion slot inside an IBM ® PC/XT/AT, or compatible PC. A standard IEEE-488 connector to an IEEE-488/GPIB cable allows an orderly and predictable means to exercise control and exchange digital data with as many as 14 instrumentation devices. The system included a software driver to provide interface to GPIB with high-level commands (e.g., REMOTE, LOCAL, SEND, RECEIVE). The software driver permitted the user to write a control program in C language, and to call various GPIB functions to perform desired operations.

Note: Student paper by Pete Yates on this project was chosen at the Twin Cities Region IEEE Contest for entry in the IEEE Region IV competition,
Chicago, IL, April 1989.

Project #4: IMAGE DISPLAY PROCESSING PACKAGE

By: Karen Christenson
Advisor: Dr. Y. Zheng
Description: Purpose was to develop a display package for image processing applications on the SUN workstation. The package was developed with the use of SunView structures and functions, the Pixrect graphics library structures and functions, and C.

Project #5: INTELLIGENT DATA ACQUISITION DEVICE*

By: Lance Mason and Daniel Miller
Advisor: Dr. S. Lekhakul
Description: This device was developed in conjunction with the Exercise Physiology Department at SCSU. Dubbed as "Electrocoach", it was a portable intelligent data acquisition device (IDAD) designed to be utilized by endurance athletes, such as runners, skiers, and cyclists, in training and competition. Data, sampled from as many as 16 sensors (heart rate, muscle strain, respiration, etc.), was stored in on-board memory, and later transferred to a PC in the lab analysis. The IDAD consisted of an 8097 Microcontroller, A/D converter, and control unit for data processing. Sampling rates and delay times were programmable with a hand-held terminal.

Project #6: MICROPROCESSOR-BASED ALARM CLOCK WITH STORED MESSAGE CAPABILITY*

By: Rick Gapinski and Tim Schaff
Advisor: Dr. A. Narayana
Description: This project involved design and construction of an alarm clock to store messages for retrieval at a specific time, 30 days into the future. Hardware includes an 8096 Microcontroller, incorporating a 10-bit A/D converter, peripheral memory chips, 7-segment display, support logic, and analog chips. Software consisted of A/D and D/A routines for voice signal, a zeroth-order predictor for data compression (to reduce the size of RAM), and drivers for displays. At user's command, a speech signal input to a built- in microphone was digitized and stored in RAM. Time for replay was set by the user and stored with the message. At the appropriate time, an alarm signaled the presence of a message, which could then be replayed.

Project #7: OPTICAL FIBER TRANSMISSION SYSTEM**

By: Ronald Anderson and Michael Engmark
Advisor: Dr. J.M. Heneghan
Description: The objective of this project was to design and build an optical fiber transmission link and test the matched filter technique as a possible means of reducing noise present in the system. Types of noise to be investigated included effects due to dispersion over long distances, coupling losses, and electrical noise in transmitter and receiver. One-way transmission was to be conducted between two PCs at a 10 Mbit/sec. rate.

Project #8: PROM PROGRAMMER**

By: James M. Thomas, Kevin L. Schultz, and Bradley A. Lahr
Advisor: Dr. S. Lekhakul
Description: Realizing that the EE department could use a PROM programmer, which could be operated via a personal computer, the group decided to design such a product. For ease of use, the programmer was designed to be menu driven from a personal computer. All user-programmer interfacing was done via pop-up menus. Seven commands were provided in the programmer for execution: Copy a file to a PROM, Transfer a PROM to a file, Compare two PROMs, Check for empty PROM, Compare PROM to Buffer RAM, Copy PROM to PROM, and Quit.

Project #9: SINGLE-FIELD VIDEO DIGITIZER

By: Kevin Sauer and Randall Shay
Advisor:
Description: Developing a circuit to convert a video image into a digital array of picture elements (pixels). Each of these pixels would be represented by a binary value corresponding to the brightness of the image. We then wanted to transmit this digitized image to a host computer through a serial RS-232 communications link, where it could be processed and displayed. Finally, it was our wish to package our circuit as a self-contained unit to collect, digitize, and store the video data from the source independently of the host computer hardware.

Project #10: STAND-ALONE ROBOT CONTROLLER**

By: Daniel J. Botz and Rich Meemken
Advisor: Dr. S. Lekhakul
Description: The goal of this project was to design and build a general-purpose stand-alone robot controller. The stand-alone unit was developed around the INTEL 8097 microcontroller, to be used for control of an Armdroid I robot. Feedback sensors were installed on the arm to return position signals from the points to the microcontroller. The controller was programmed to recognize a set of audible commands to perform specified actions.

Project #11: STAND-ALONE VIDEO CAPTURE, DISPLAY AND PROCESSING UNIT

By: Michael Surma and Rick Monroe
Advisor: Dr. Y. Zheng
Description: The project is to design a low cost video digitizer and processing system to be used for real time industrial applications such as non-destructive testing. The device has standard 525 line, monochrome video input and output. The system is stand-alone and simple to operate. An Intel 80186 microprocessor controls the user interface and image capture and display. A TMS320C25 digital signal processor performs high-speed image enhancement algorithms on the digitized image. Several state machines were implemented on erasable programmable logic devices (EPLDs) to perform the image capture and display. Both interlaced video fields were captured, yielding 482 lines with 512 pixels and 8 bits per pixel.

Note: Student paper by Michael Surma on this project received first prize in the IEEE Region IV competition. Chicago, IL, April 1989. This paper will be published in the 1989 IEEE Student Journal.

Project #12: STARLAN**

By: Matthew Yackel, Maria Mazur II, and Cal Wright
Advisor: Dr. B. W. Ellis
Description: The group's project goal was to establish an unacknowledged connectionless communication link between two PCs and between each PC and an information server using StarLAN (a standard which the IEEE Task Force defined in 1984) Local Area Network. An unacknowledged service is a link in which the sender does not request an acknowledgement from the receiver to state that the transmission was received. In connectionless service, the transmission is sent out by the node without a firm connection (an agreement that the one node will transmit and the other will receive) being established first (i.e. one does not dedicate the network to that transmission). To be more specific, the goal was to design and build a demonstration model of StarLAN with an information server that would respond to a request from the PCs on the network. The link consisted of the basic elements to establish a LAN.

Project #13: TALKER

By: Rick Gapinski and Tim Schaaf
Advisor: Dr. A. Narayana, Dr. Y. Zheng, and Dr. B. W. Ellis
Description: A talking alarm clock in which the alarm would be the user's voice. The user records a message and when the alarm goes off that message is played back. The alarm can be set several days, weeks, or months in advance. The user can also program multiple alarms. Using the numeric keypad, the user directly enters the numbers of the desired time.

Project #14: TRANSPUTER PROJECT

By: Gary R. Todd, Dave Reini, and Steve Paydon
Advisor: Dr. K. J. Miller
Description: The project consisted of design and construction of a parallel processing system using 16-bit Inmos Transputers and the Occam programming language. The project used four transputers interconnected through high-speed data links to a transputer development system contained in a PC. The transputer network was used to run Occam applications programs to demonstrate the speed advantages gained by parallel processing.

Note: Student paper by Dave Reini on the project received first place in the IEEE Twin Cities Section student paper contest. Minneapolis, MN, May 1989.

Project #15: VIDEO DIGITIZER

By: Clarence M. Matson, Jeff Hendrick, and Gordy Ikeji
Advisor: Dr. R.A. Higgins
Description: The design and construction of an 80188 microprocessor based video digitizer involved the hardware construction of the A/D capture unit and the construction of a state machine to produce the proper synchronizing pulses required for proper electron gun monitor display.

Project #16: VIDEO DIGITIZER/ENHANCER

By: Thomas G. Fjerstad and Thomas C. Clausing
Advisor: Dr. Y. Zheng
Description: The system was described as a video digitizer because the composite output video signal from a TV, VCR, or TV camera was converted to an 8-bit pixel representation via an analog-to-digital (A/D) converter. This 8-bit pixel representation allows a 256 gray scale image to be transmitted through a digital-to-analog (D/A) converter, processed by an IBM PC and redisplayed on a television screen. Screen resolution is 510 pixels per line and 488 lines per frame. This resolution requires the system clock to operate at 10 MHz. Coding algorithms in a computer language and running these programs with the pixel data obtained from the A/D conversion performs image enhancement.

Project #17: VOICE DIGITIZATION SYSTEM**

By: Jeff Engel and Jim Cullum
Advisor: Dr. Y. Zheng
Description: This project was to design and build a voice digitization and processing system. The system that was constructed performed the following functions: a message was printed on the screen, prompting the user to select either Pulse Code Modulation (PCM) or Adaptive Delta Modulation (ADM) coding, a message was then printed, prompting the user to choose a sampling frequency from a list of given frequencies, and to press the start button, a TMS320C25 sampled the data coming form the input, coded the data using the selected coding scheme, and stored the data in memory, a message was printed on the screen telling the user that the memory was full and to send the data to a D/A converter by pushing the start button.