Project

# Title Team Members TA Documents Sponsor
31 A Modular Light Array
Ashwin Mukund
Noah Feinberg
Charles Ross design_document4.pdf
design_document5.pdf
final_paper1.pdf
proposal1.pdf
Project Members: Noah Feinberg - nbf2 , Ashwin Mukund - amukund2

Problem: During the holidays its always really fun to setup light displays with cool designs. However I find that my family tends to set the lights up in the same way every time. So I would like there to be a tool out there for me to easily make a quick drawings and have it display on the lights for me.

Solution: An application program where you draw a design on the application and it translates the design onto a 2D panel LED hardware light display. A user will draw an image on an application in gray-scale. The gray scale drawing then be translated into brightness for each light in the display. The 2D panel LED light display, which will be lights hooked up in parallel, will be connected to a raspberry or something which will interpret the gray scale image and update the lights to match the drawn image. Such a system would allow for simple updating of light based simple images. We decided to use a 2d grid for our light display to make it easier to translate images from an application to the grid itself.

Solution Components:

-LED Strips - Display grid/hardware for displaying patterns drawn. LED lights would be primary components for this subsystem, with the important requirement that we have the ability to modulate their brightness. For this project, we would have an 8x8 LED grid Panel.

- Control system for Led Strips - Distribute signals to each of the LED's in strip to dictate brightness of each light within grid. Control system will uniquely identify each light as simply as possible.

-network subsystem to connect control system to physical interface - Bluetooth receiver pair, one connected to the control system for dictating commands, an the other would be receiving the LED signals from the application. The PCB would contain the Bluetooth module that would enable this component

-front end interface - User menu to input images to display on hardware grid, would most likely be a phone app. Instructions to controller would be sent through Bluetooth.

-image analysis - transformation of image received in front end interface into proper instructions to be sent hardware grid. Analysis would be performed on phone.

Criterion for Success: If we are able to display a sample gray-scale image onto the light display with some level of fidelity. Another criterion would be the ability to properly transform a gray-scale image from the front end application to a level that would be mimic-able by the hardware grid.

Side-note: As mentioned in the idea post, this idea is similar to the Christmas light product referenced to us. We are trying to simulate images onto the hardware with the restriction of gray-scale, meaning we will have the ability to modulate brightness, as opposed to an on-off system implemented by the Christmas lights suggested to us. There is also the requirement for this to be modular, meaning multiple displays could be chained together for decoration purposes.

Propeller-less Multi-rotor

Ignacio Aguirre Panadero, Bree Peng, Leo Yamamae

Propeller-less Multi-rotor

Featured Project

Our project explored the every-expanding field of drones. We wanted to solve a problem with the dangers of plastic propellers as well as explore new method of propulsion for drones.

Our design uses a centrifugal fan design inspired by Samm Shepard's "This is NOT a Propeller" video where he created a centrifugal fan for a radio controlled plane. We were able to design a fan that has a peak output of 550g per fan that is safe when crashing and when the impeller inside damaged.

The chassis and fans are made of laser-cut polystyrene and is powered using brushless motors typically used for radio-controlled helicopters.

The drone uses an Arduino DUE with a custom shield and a PCB to control the system via Electronic Speed Controllers. The drone also has a feedback loop that will try to level the drone using a MPU6050.

We were able to prove that this method of drone propulsion is possible and is safer than using hard plastic propellers.

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