Project

# Title Team Members TA Documents Sponsor
81 Laser Tag Droid
Christian Topete
Jake Hamill
Martin Litwiller
Eric Clark design_document0.docx
design_document0.pdf
final_paper0.pdf
other0.pptx
other0.pdf
proposal0.pdf
Group Members:
Martin Litwiller litwill2
Christian Topete topete2
Jake Hamill jhamill2

We plan to make a multi-player laser tag game in which each player controls a wheeled smart phone app-controlled vehicle mounted with a camera and 2-axis laser turret. The goal would be to maneuver your vehicle around a playing field and shoot the opponents' vehicles on their target sensors.
The vehicle will be powered by a standard 2-cell 7.4V LiPo hobby battery, and will be controlled remotely over wi-fi from your smart phone. It will have a camera providing live video feed to the user. The laser gun will be fireable from the smart phone app and have a finite firing speed to mimic real weapons. The hardware design components will include power regulation from the battery to the laser, motors, camera, and control circuitry, and building the control circuitry. We will design the motor control rather than using existing packages. We will also include a software component by programming a smart phone app with which to operate the Droid.
Our product will be unique from existing products because many similar laser tag robots are bipedal, expensive, and too slow to present an engaging gameplay. Our vehicle will be wheeled, much cheaper, and much quicker ensuring a challenging and fun game.

Low Cost Distributed Battery Management System

Logan Rosenmayer, Daksh Saraf

Low Cost Distributed Battery Management System

Featured Project

Web Board Link: https://courses.engr.illinois.edu/ece445/pace/view-topic.asp?id=27207

Block Diagram: https://imgur.com/GIzjG8R

Members: Logan Rosenmayer (Rosenma2), Anthony Chemaly(chemaly2)

The goal of this project is to design a low cost BMS (Battery Management System) system that is flexible and modular. The BMS must ensure safe operation of lithium ion batteries by protecting the batteries from: Over temperature, overcharge, overdischarge, and overcurrent all at the cell level. Additionally, the should provide cell balancing to maintain overall pack capacity. Last a BMS should be track SOC(state of charge) and SOH (state of health) of the overall pack.

To meet these goals, we plan to integrate a MCU into each module that will handle measurements and report to the module below it. This allows for reconfiguration of battery’s, module replacements. Currently major companies that offer stackable BMSs don’t offer single cell modularity, require software adjustments and require sense wires to be ran back to the centralized IC. Our proposed solution will be able to remain in the same price range as other centralized solutions by utilizing mass produced general purpose microcontrollers and opto-isolators. This project carries a mix of hardware and software challenges. The software side will consist of communication protocol design, interrupt/sleep cycles, and power management. Hardware will consist of communication level shifting, MCU selection, battery voltage and current monitoring circuits, DC/DC converter all with low power draws and cost. (uAs and ~$2.50 without mounting)