Adventures & Quests

Adventures

There are a number of Adventures (more adventure ...less assignment) that you will be working on during the first six weeks of the class. The adventures change between course offerings. Some examples of past adventures include:
- Design of a calculator like the windows calculator
- Washing Machine Simulation System
- A Brewery simulator
- Love Detection and Support System
- Longwall mining - roof support simulator
- Touchscreen kiosk for kids (on a real touchscreen)
- Opportunity Recognition with Dexter, Jimmy Neutron, Superman, Homer Simpson, Top Cat and Captain Planet.

Quests

Quests are like Team Labs - but much more challenging and have significant room for creativity and innovation. At the end of the quest, you negotiate your scores with the instructor. If you dont like the quest, let's negotiate a different quest. Remember, it's your Quest!!!

Camera Control

Control a camera mounted on a pan/tilt system using a Joystick
Control the camera remotely over the net and stream data on a webpage

Automated Testing Station

Develop an Automated Test Station (ATS) to characterize amplifiers
The ATS communicates over GPIB with a Power Supply, Function Generator & Digital Multimeter
The amplifiers are identified by barcodes & so the system uses a bar code scanner
Perform testing (for functionality and gain) & characterization (for cut-off frequency) on the amplifiers
The information about the amplifiers should be stored in a Datalog file & another program to retrieve the data should be developed

Compact RIO based Stepper motor control lab

cRIO based system to control the position of a stepper motor
A Laser pointer is mounted on the stepper motor
There is a disk with four light sensors. When a flashlight is directed at this disk, the cRIO controller should reposition the stepper motor and shoot the Laser back at the flashlight
Gaining experience working with computers of other form factors & FPGA based controllers is the ultimate objective

Hospital 2010

Set up a Personal Area Network (PAN) for a patient
The PAN includes three nodes:
      A PDA which accumulates information from various health monitors & displays it on the screen. PDA also displays basic patient & Doctor information (Name, Sex, Notes, etc.)
      A pulse oximeter that transmits information to the PDA (Bluetooth)
      A Weighing Scale and Blood Pressure monitor that connect to a laptop which transmits info to the PDA over Bluetooth
The PDA transmits this data to the Central Station (same laptop) over a Wi-Fi link (ad-hoc network with TCP/IP)
RFID scanner(s) track patients inside the hospital & are connected to the Central Station