Project

# Title Team Members TA Documents Sponsor
4 Eartag Livestock Temperature Monitor
 Cain Benink
Michael Goldstein
Yue Wang
 Daniel Gardner design_document0.pdf
final_paper0.pdf
presentation0.pdf
proposal0.pdf
Problem: Currently, sick animals are diagnosed almost entirely by hand by looking for symptoms such as reduced activity and runny noses. This results in farmers spending a lot of money and time either unnecessarily medicating or having vet visits for healthy animals. On the other end of the spectrum, some farmers fail to medicate sick animals which when animals die leads to a lot of money lost.

Solution: Regularly monitor livestock (cattle/swine/sheep) temperatures so that sick animals can be diagnosed sooner and more accurately.

Technical Overview: We propose to solve the problem by adding electronics to the ear tags of livestock to constantly monitor their temperatures and detect when they are running a fever. We will have a thermistor that can measure the animal’s temperature within its ear canal. A radio transmitter will send the data to a receiver where it will detect and report which animals are sick.

Competitors: A few similar products are on the market. A “cow fitbit” made by Qualified Ag suffers from the problem of being too expensive. “Fever Tag” was shown by researchers to not be very effective at accurately detecting sick animals. We aim to innovate on this idea by providing an inexpensive product that accurately detects fevers in livestock.

End result: Earlier, more accurate diagnostics of sick animals leading to:
* Less animal medication
* Slower progression of antibiotic resistance in livestock
* Animals that don’t require medicine avoid medication
* Preservation of ‘organic’ status in livestock used for meat
* Reduced vet visits
* Less labor required for monitoring entire herd’s health

Team Members:
Michael Goldstein (mjgolds2)
Yue Wang (ywang359)
Cain Benink (benink2)

https://courses.engr.illinois.edu/ece445/pace/view-topic.asp?id=13384

Prosthetic Control Board

Caleb Albers, Daniel Lee

Prosthetic Control Board

Featured Project

Psyonic is a local start-up that has been working on a prosthetic arm with an impressive set of features as well as being affordable. The current iteration of the main hand board is functional, but has limitations in computational power as well as scalability. In lieu of this, Psyonic wishes to switch to a production-ready chip that is an improvement on the current micro controller by utilizing a more modern architecture. During this change a few new features would be added that would improve safety, allow for easier debugging, and fix some issues present in the current implementation. The board is also slated to communicate with several other boards found in the hand. Additionally we are looking at the possibility of improving the longevity of the product with methods such as conformal coating and potting.

Core Functionality:

Replace microcontroller, change connectors, and code software to send control signals to the motor drivers

Tier 1 functions:

Add additional communication interfaces (I2C), and add temperature sensor.

Tier 2 functions:

Setup framework for communication between other boards, and improve board longevity.

Overview of proposed changes by affected area:

Microcontroller/Architecture Change:

Teensy -> Production-ready chip (most likely ARM based, i.e. STM32 family of processors)

Board:

support new microcontroller, adding additional communication interfaces (I2C), change to more robust connector. (will need to design pcb for both main control as well as finger sensors)

Sensor:

Addition of a temperature sensor to provide temperature feedback to the microcontroller.

Software:

change from Arduino IDE to new toolchain. (ARM has various base libraries such as mbed and can be configured for use with eclipse to act as IDE) Lay out framework to allow communication from other boards found in other parts of the arm.