Project

# Title Team Members TA Documents Sponsor
8 Hearing Damage Detector and Alarm System
Alex Yuan
Jake Fava
Jinzhi Shen
Hojoon Ryu design_document7.pdf
final_paper5.docx
photo1.jpg
photo2.jpg
presentation1.pptx
proposal1.pdf
video
# Hearing Damage Detector and Alarm System

Team Members:
- Alex Yuan (ayuan20)
- Jinzhi Shen (jinzhis2)
- Jake Fava (jfava2)

# Problem

Middle and high school musicians can be subjected to harmful levels of noise on a daily basis between rehearsals, practice sessions, and performances. Cheap and effective hearing protection is available, but many students neglect using it until they start noticing the effects of their hearing damage years later.

# Solution

Our solution is a device that provides live feedback to musicians about their noise exposure in an attempt to encourage more regular use of existing hearing protection equipment.

# Solution Components

## Subsystem 1 - Sensor Interface (Microphone)

To capture the sound pressure levels, we’ll need a microphone that is omni-directional, responsive to the frequencies that the human ear is responsive to (about 10Hz-20kHz), and has a suitably high signal-to-noise ratio (~60dB or above). One microphone that fits these criteria is the TOM-1537L-HD-LW100-B-R.

Accompanying this microphone will be a pre-amp circuit to filter out DC noise and prepare readings to be used by the microcontroller.

## Subsystem 2 - Microcontroller Unit

Our microcontroller will need to be able to take input data from the microphone interface and turn it into useful information for the user. There are two types of feedback we’d like to be able to provide: 1 - instantaneous SPL readings in dB and 2 - integrated SPL over time (also called “sound exposure”) to gauge potential hearing damage accumulated over a session. A potential MCU to use for our device is the ATMega4808, which contains a 10-bit analog-to-digital converter and 48 kB of RAM.

Although a future version of this device could be powered by a rechargeable lithium-ion battery for the sake of portability. Due to time and scope limitations of the course, we will be powering this device via USB.

## Subsystem 3 - User Interface

To present live feedback on instantaneous SPL, the device could feature a series of LEDS that light up in response to recorded dB. They should range from green for safe sound levels up to red for potentially dangerous sound levels.

To present a report of sound exposure over the course of a session, we will plan to pull the data from the device onto a computer (just like the computers that would be located in a practice room or classroom) and perform the necessary integration operation there to conserve system resources. This operation will produce a report detailing the amount of sound exposure and what hearing damage it has the potential to cause.

# Criterion For Success

1. The device needs to be able take a signal from a microphone and accurately calculate SPL from the data.
2. The device needs to be able to display instantaneous SPL data in the form of lit-up LEDs
3. The device needs to be able to upload recorded SPL data to a computer to perform the integration and generate a report.

Dynamic Legged Robot

Joseph Byrnes, Kanyon Edvall, Ahsan Qureshi

Featured Project

We plan to create a dynamic robot with one to two legs stabilized in one or two dimensions in order to demonstrate jumping and forward/backward walking. This project will demonstrate the feasibility of inexpensive walking robots and provide the starting point for a novel quadrupedal robot. We will write a hybrid position-force task space controller for each leg. We will use a modified version of the ODrive open source motor controller to control the torque of the joints. The joints will be driven with high torque off-the-shelf brushless DC motors. We will use high precision magnetic encoders such as the AS5048A to read the angles of each joint. The inverse dynamics calculations and system controller will run on a TI F28335 processor.

We feel that this project appropriately brings together knowledge from our previous coursework as well as our extracurricular, research, and professional experiences. It allows each one of us to apply our strengths to an exciting and novel project. We plan to use the legs, software, and simulation that we develop in this class to create a fully functional quadruped in the future and release our work so that others can build off of our project. This project will be very time intensive but we are very passionate about this project and confident that we are up for the challenge.

While dynamically stable quadrupeds exist— Boston Dynamics’ Spot mini, Unitree’s Laikago, Ghost Robotics’ Vision, etc— all of these robots use custom motors and/or proprietary control algorithms which are not conducive to the increase of legged robotics development. With a well documented affordable quadruped platform we believe more engineers will be motivated and able to contribute to development of legged robotics.

More specifics detailed here:

https://courses.engr.illinois.edu/ece445/pace/view-topic.asp?id=30338

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