Project :: ECE 445 - Senior Design Laboratory

#	Title	Team Members	TA	Documents	Sponsor
50	Home Energy Administration Tool	Edward Choi Jae Min Song Jee Haeng Yoo	Nicholas Ratajczyk	appendix0.pdf final_paper0.pdf presentation0.pptx proposal0.pdf
	How much do you pay for the electricity at home? Have you ever thought of saving energy? But do you even know how much energy is consumed by each appliance? In order to spend electricity efficiently, I came up with the idea of developing an administrative tool that not only controls the power, but also keeps track of each device's energy consumption. I am trying to implement this on simplified house model for this project. The tool will enable user to (1) remote control power at home on web application using smartphone and (2) monitor detailed information- time, amount, and usage pattern- on energy consumption of electronics or lighting at home through charts- also on the web application. I expect this tool to allow people to be aware of their spending and to cut down electricity bill. I am planning to construct a house model with snap-in receptacles so that I can plug in actual electronic devices that use 120V AC. I would also need components to measure power dissipation of each receptacle. There will be a designed PCB that runs all components in the house model. PCB will also include esp32- this allows hosting a web server- and a micro-controller to display information on web server so that it allows user to remote control power and monitor energy consumption.

Featured Project

# Automatic Piano Tuner

Team Members:

- Colin Wallace (colinpw2)

- Riley Woodson (rileycw2)

- Joseph Babbo (jbabbo2)

# Problem

Piano tuning is a time-consuming and expensive process. An average piano tuning will cost in the $100 - $200 range and a piano will have to be retuned multiple times to maintain the correct pitch. Due to the strength required to alter the piano pegs it is also something that is difficult for the less physically able to accomplish.

# Solution

We hope to bring piano tuning to the masses by creating an easy to use product which will be able to automatically tune a piano by giving the key as input alongside playing the key to get the pitch differential and automatically turning the piano pegs until they reach the correct note.

# Solution Components

## Subsystem 1 - Motor Assembly

A standard tuning pin requires 8-14 nm of torque to successfully tune. We will thus need to create a motor assembly that is able to produce enough torque to rotate standard tuning pins.

## Subsystem 2 - Frequency Detector/Tuner

The device will use a microphone to gather audio measurements. Then a microprocessor processes the audio data to detect the pitch and determine the difference from the desired frequency. This can then generate instructions for the motor; direction to turn pegs and amount to turn it by.

## Subsystem 3 - User Interface/Display Panel

A small but intuitive display and button configuration can be used for this device. It will be required for the user to set the key being played using buttons on the device and reading the output of the display. As the device will tune by itself after hearing the tone, all that is required to display is the current key and octave. A couple of buttons will suffice to be able to cycle up and down keys and octaves.

## Subsystem 4 - Replaceable Battery/Power Supply

Every commercial product should use standard replaceable batteries, or provide a way for easy charging. As we want to develop a handheld device, so that the device doesn’t have to drag power wires into the piano, we will need a rechargeable battery pack.

# Criterion For Success

The aim of the Automatic Piano Tuner is to allow the user to automatically tune piano strings based on a key input alongside playing a note. We have several goals to help us meet this aim:

- Measure pitch accurately, test against known good pitches

- Motor generates enough torque to turn the pegs on a piano

- Tuner turns correctly depending on pitch

- Easy tuning of a piano by a single untrained person

Project Videos

DemoVideo1