Project

# Title Team Members TA Documents Sponsor
11 Bill Tech Dollar Sorter
 Javier Martinez Linera
Justin Hsieh
Pratheek Eravelli
 Jeff Chang design_document2.pdf
final_paper2.pdf
photo1.jpeg
photo2.jpeg
presentation1.pptx
proposal1.pdf
TEAM MEMBERS:

Pre2, jhsieh6, javierm7

PROBLEM:

In the United States paper currency has no tactile differentiation between bills. For those with visual impairments this can be a big problem especially for those who live alone. At the end of the day when someone makes several transactions with a known amount of currency (let us say for example, that they go out with 4 twenty dollar bills), the amount of money remaining needs to be sorted and put into easily identifiable places for someone with visual impairment to access.
This problem only exists for paper currency as coins already have different shapes and their edges feel different so they are more easily identifiable.

SOLUTION:
- Machine can sort through a stack of assorted bills and return a dollar amount
- Bills get sorted into compartments
- Machine designed to be a desktop device
- Powered from wall outlet

The first solution doesn't need to be a mobile solution as it would be a device that stays at home while the user goes throughout their day. This device could come with other features so that it isn't just a money sorter, but it should be able to succeed in this specific aspect. This project would not be considered a success if it wasn't able to accurately sort and identify bills.
The user puts a random assortment of bills into the device. The user then presses a button which initiates the counting and sorting mechanisms.

The mechanism works as follows:

Each of the individual bills is rolled one at a time into the device and the camera is used to “scan” the bill while image recognition is used to identify the bill. The physical sorting mechanism of the device uses the classification from the image recognition to place the bill in the proper container. As this process occurs after each bill is individually sorted and scanned the product should produce some sort of either haptic feedback, or sound to tell the user that 1 bill has been processed. Once the entire stack of bills is processed a different sound will alert the user that their transaction has finished and the device will read out the final sorted amount.

SOLUTION COMPONENTS:

- Camera to identify bills
- Motor to extract singular bill from stack
- Button to start machine
- Speaker to read out deposit
- Microprocessor to identify bills

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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