Project

# Title Team Members TA Documents Sponsor
12 User Specific Gun Locking System
 Andrew Weller
Steven Bettenhausen
Yong Seok Lee
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Our project will improve gun safety in the home, as well as in stores where guns are sold. We will create a system to ensure that it is not fired by anyone but the rightful owner. We will accomplish this by using a fingerprint scanner and locking mechanisms.

For the gun to have any operational capacity, the user must first scan their fingerprint on the fingerprint scanner. The scanner will be on a unit separate from the gun and will send commands to the locking mechanism wirelessly to avoid attaching a bulky unit onto the gun. A successful scan by an authorized user will allow the gun to be operated as long as the user is holding the gun or for a time specified by the user; this setting will be determined by the user. If the user chooses to keep the gun operational only when holding it, readings will be taken via a pressure sensor placed on the handle of the gun and the gun will remain unlocked as long as an eligible user is handling it. If an unauthorized person attempts to use the gun, it will remain locked and they will be unable to remove the magazine or fire. When multiple unsuccessful fingerprint scans are done in rapid succession, about 30 seconds, the gun will remain in the locked state for several minutes. This system will be implemented by interfacing a fingerprint reader, pressure sensors, mechanical parts, and electronic signals to lock and unlock the gun.

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.

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