Project

# Title Team Members TA Documents Sponsor
57 Water Aliasing
 Atreyee Roy
Siddharth Sharma
 Luke Wendt design_document0.pdf
design_document0.pdf
design_document0.pdf
final_paper0.pdf
photo0.jpg
presentation0.pptx
proposal0.pdf
Members:

Atreyee Roy - aroy10
Siddharth Sharma - srsharm2

Idea:

During the pitching session, our TA Luke Wendt talked about the Water Aliasing Project that we immediately took an interest in. The basic idea behind this project is to create an illusion by playing around with the frequency of water and the frequency of a strobe light. Even though many people have performed this experiment already, we plan to add some additional features to our design so it is more interactive for the user and does more than simply levitate or move up or down.

Hardware Description:

We will need to create the circuit for the strobe light that we plan to have on the side panels of our system so it can illuminate multiple columns of water. We will design a panel of LEDs that will be on for short bursts of time to have very sharp droplets visible. Ideally we plan to design this strobe light circuit with comparators, transistors (>10 A), and regulators, along with other generic components that we may need as we figure out the circuit. These will be mainly needed to create the short bursts of light (really narrow input signals). We plan to generate and control the frequency of our strobe light with a signal generator, so it is easy to change or maintain the frequency we need for any particular mode (up, down, still).

For the water, we plan to create 4 columns, each pipe from a water pump to recycle the water used, to be run at independent frequencies with small speakers. We looked into Piezoelectric benders (coin type speakers) that are tiny and their frequencies and start and stop times can be controlled with extreme precision. They also happen to be cheaper than other options.

Software Description:

We plan to integrate user interfacing in this project. What we envisioned is a simple app that has three buttons arranged one below the other, in 4 columns- one for each column of water. Through this app, we can control the up and down, or still, motion of each column of water independently. Then, simultaneously each column can have a different movement, based on the user’s wish. We plan to transmit a bluetooth signal with our app, which will be received by our controller to alter the frequencies of the speakers as required. This will be achieved by our code for the controller design.

We expect that once we can figure out how to transmit even one of these commands to the controller, the rest will be a matter of scaling and we can have the user play with the controls on the app to make the water flow as desired.

Important concerns regarding safety:

Since this is a water based project, we plan to do it on a small scale so it is easy to work on and portable eventually. We may encase the entire system in a glass box, with the strobe lights on the sides. We think this will also give it an aesthetic value, while being contained and safe, minimising spillage.

Background:

Our team consists of an Electrical Engineer and a Computer Engineer, with background in microelectronic circuit design, control systems, artificial intelligence, machine learning, along with a strong coding background.

Cypress Robot Kit

Todd Nguyen, Byung Joo Park, Alvin Wu

Cypress Robot Kit

Featured Project

Cypress is looking to develop a robotic kit with the purpose of interesting the maker community in the PSOC and its potential. We will be developing a shield that will attach to a PSoC board that will interface to our motors and sensors. To make the shield, we will design our own PCB that will mount on the PSoC directly. The end product will be a remote controlled rover-like robot (through bluetooth) with sensors to achieve line following and obstacle avoidance.

The modules that we will implement:

- Motor Control: H-bridge and PWM control

- Bluetooth Control: Serial communication with PSoC BLE Module, and phone application

- Line Following System: IR sensors

- Obstacle Avoidance System: Ultrasonic sensor

Cypress wishes to use as many off-the-shelf products as possible in order to achieve a “kit-able” design for hobbyists. Building the robot will be a plug-and-play experience so that users can focus on exploring the capabilities of the PSoC.

Our robot will offer three modes which can be toggled through the app: a line following mode, an obstacle-avoiding mode, and a manual-control mode. In the manual-control mode, one will be able to control the motors with the app. In autonomous modes, the robot will be controlled based off of the input from the sensors.