People :: ECE 445 - Senior Design Laboratory

People

TA Office Hours

Held weekly in the senior design lab (ECEB 2070/2072). NOTE:

Blue names are office hours held for only 30 minutes. The rest are for 1 hour.

Names highlighted in orange are additional office hours available up to the due date of the soldering assignment.

There are no office hours during the weeks of board reviews or final demos.

Chat Room

Ask technical questions here:

Fall 2023 Instructors

Name Area
Prof. Arne Fliflet (Instructor)
3056
afliflet@illinois.edu
microwave generation and applications
Prof. Rakesh Kumar (Instructor)

rakeshk@illinois.edu
Prof. Olga Mironenko (Instructor)

olgamiro@illinois.edu
Prof. Michael Oelze (Instructor)
ECEB 2056
oelze@illinois.edu
Biomedical Imaging, Acoustics, Nondestructive Testing
Prof. Victoria Shao (Instructor)

yangshao@illinois.edu
Nikhil Arora (TA)

na32@illinois.edu
Mechanical Design, Automotive Technologies, Additive Manufacturing
Sainath Barbhai (TA)

barbhai2@illinois.edu
Design Engineering, Finite Element Method, Sensors and Actuators
Jeff Chang (TA)

kcchang3@illinois.edu
DSP/Deep Learning/Audio
Stasiu Chyczewski (TA)

stasiuc2@illinois.edu
Magnetic materials/devices, 2D materials, wireless power
Gregory Jun (TA)

hgjun2@illinois.edu
Zicheng Ma (TA)

zicheng5@illinois.edu
Distributed systems, Database systems
Abhisheka Mathur Sekar (TA)

am113@illinois.edu
Mechanical Engineering, Design, CAD Modelling and Simulation, Fluid Mechanics, MRI
David Null (TA)

null2@illinois.edu
Robotics, Computer Vision, Navigation, Coordinated Systems, Control Systems.
Jason Paximadas (TA)

jop2@illinois.edu
Power electronics, control, and instrumentation
Sanjana Pingali (TA)

pingali4@illinois.edu
Machine Learning Systems
Jason Zhang (TA)

zekaiz2@illinois.edu
Robot and human interactions
Jialiang Zhang (TA)
CSL 403
jz23@illinois.edu
Hardware Systems, Computer Architecture
Tianxiang Zheng (TA)

tz32@illinois.edu
FPGA hls and mlir; Chronic signal processing; robotics and control; 3D printing;

Other Important People

https://ece.illinois.edu/about/directory/staff

VoxBox Robo-Drummer

Craig Bost, Nicholas Dulin, Drake Proffitt

VoxBox Robo-Drummer

Featured Project

Our group proposes to create robot drummer which would respond to human voice "beatboxing" input, via conventional dynamic microphone, and translate the input into the corresponding drum hit performance. For example, if the human user issues a bass-kick voice sound, the robot will recognize it and strike the bass drum; and likewise for the hi-hat/snare and clap. Our design will minimally cover 3 different drum hit types (bass hit, snare hit, clap hit), and respond with minimal latency.

This would involve amplifying the analog signal (as dynamic mics drive fairly low gain signals), which would be sampled by a dsPIC33F DSP/MCU (or comparable chipset), and processed for trigger event recognition. This entails applying Short-Time Fourier Transform analysis to provide spectral content data to our event detection algorithm (i.e. recognizing the "control" signal from the human user). The MCU functionality of the dsPIC33F would be used for relaying the trigger commands to the actuator circuits controlling the robot.

The robot in question would be small; about the size of ventriloquist dummy. The "drum set" would be scaled accordingly (think pots and pans, like a child would play with). Actuators would likely be based on solenoids, as opposed to motors.

Beyond these minimal capabilities, we would add analog prefiltering of the input audio signal, and amplification of the drum hits, as bonus features if the development and implementation process goes better than expected.

Project Videos