Project

# Title Team Members TA Documents Sponsor
65 Electric Paintbrush Cleaner
 John Kriston
Luis Bibian
Yael Legaria
 Madison Hedlund design_document3.pdf
design_document4.pdf
design_document5.pdf
design_document1.pdf
design_document2.pdf
final_paper1.pdf
presentation1.pdf
proposal1.pdf
proposal2.pdf
Group Members :[Luis Bibian], [Yael Legaria]
Net IDs: [bibian2], [legaria2]

Problem: When painting, most people like to keep a cup/bucket of water around to clean their brushes in but, this can get very messy especially when you're cleaning the brushes with your fingers. Eventually, the water gets dirty, you get all wet, your paintbrushes aren't clean, and your masterpiece gets ruined. Now, what was supposed to be a relaxing hobby has become a stressful situation.

Solution Overview : An electric paintbrush cleaner that perfectly cleans your paintbrush every time. All you have to do is insert your brush. Think of it as an electric pencil sharpener but, instead of sharpening pencils that are inserted, it cleans paintbrushes.

Solution Components:

-Power System

Ideally we want to be able to plug the device into a wall so we will need to use an AC-DC converter with several available output voltages to power the system.

-A clean water tank with a small water pump to send water to the cleaning mechanism.

-A sensory system that senses when a paintbrush is inserted which tells the machine to start/stop operation.

In order to sense the motion of the paintbrush being inserted to begin the cleaning process, we can use a PIR sensor that will be placed inside of the device that will sense when the paintbrush is inserted. This signal would be processed by a microcontroller, and in order to avoid the PIR sensor continually triggering once the paintbrush has been inserted due to any additional movements, we can set a cleaning cycle duration where the PIR sensor data will be ignored until the cleaning cycle has officially ended.

-A cleaning mechanism such as spinning cleaning brushes that will work with the water to clean the brush.

The spinning brushes used to clean the paintbrush can be driven by a DC gear motor. The brush cleaners will need to spin parallel to the direction of the bristles in order to avoid damaging the paintbrush. In order to not interfere with the water coming from the clean water reservoir, we can have the motorized brush cleaning mechanism initially positioned further back within the device housing so that the paintbrush can first be rinsed by the water coming from the water pump. The brush cleaning mechanism can then move forward to position the cleaning brushes above the paintbrush, and for this we would have to build a belt drive system to move the cleaning mechanism back and forth.

-A drain and disposable tank to collect the dirty water used during the cleaning operation.

Criterion for Success: The main goal of this project will be to create an machine which is capable of sufficiently cleaning a paintbrush which has recently been used. This means that if you were to touch the brush to paper after the cleaning operation, you should see no color. This should all be done without harming the paintbrush, at least no differently then you would when cleaning it with your fingers. This should all be done automatically with the person only having to insert and hold his/her paintbrush.

Overall, the group will need to design an appropriate power distribution layout for the machine, create a working sensory system, waterproof the circuitry, design a harmless cleaning mechanism, properly set up a start/stop water pump system, and design the structure where all the components will be placed to be efficient and visually appealing for the user.

Resonant Cavity Field Profiler

Salaj Ganesh, Max Goin, Furkan Yazici

Resonant Cavity Field Profiler

Featured Project

# Team Members:

- Max Goin (jgoin2)

- Furkan Yazici (fyazici2)

- Salaj Ganesh (salajg2)

# Problem

We are interested in completing the project proposal submitted by Starfire for designing a device to tune Resonant Cavity Particle Accelerators. We are working with Tom Houlahan, the engineer responsible for the project, and have met with him to discuss the project already.

Resonant Cavity Particle Accelerators require fine control and characterization of their electric field to function correctly. This can be accomplished by pulling a metal bead through the cavities displacing empty volume occupied by the field, resulting in measurable changes to its operation. This is typically done manually, which is very time-consuming (can take up to 2 days).

# Solution

We intend on massively speeding up this process by designing an apparatus to automate the process using a microcontroller and stepper motor driver. This device will move the bead through all 4 cavities of the accelerator while simultaneously making measurements to estimate the current field conditions in response to the bead. This will help technicians properly tune the cavities to obtain optimum performance.

# Solution Components

## MCU:

STM32Fxxx (depending on availability)

Supplies drive signals to a stepper motor to step the metal bead through the 4 quadrants of the RF cavity. Controls a front panel to indicate the current state of the system. Communicates to an external computer to allow the user to set operating conditions and to log position and field intensity data for further analysis.

An MCU with a decent onboard ADC and DAC would be preferred to keep design complexity minimum. Otherwise, high MIPS performance isn’t critical.

## Frequency-Lock Circuitry:

Maintains a drive frequency that is equal to the resonant frequency. A series of op-amps will filter and form a control loop from output signals from the RF front end before sampling by the ADCs. 2 Op-Amps will be required for this task with no specific performance requirements.

## AC/DC Conversion & Regulation:

Takes an AC voltage(120V, 60Hz) from the wall and supplies a stable DC voltage to power MCU and motor driver. Ripple output must meet minimum specifications as stated in the selected MCU datasheet.

## Stepper Drive:

IC to control a stepper motor. There are many options available, for example, a Trinamic TMC2100. Any stepper driver with a decent resolution will work just fine. The stepper motor will not experience large loading, so the part choice can be very flexible.

## ADC/DAC:

Samples feedback signals from the RF front end and outputs the digital signal to MCU. This component may also be built into the MCU.

## Front Panel Indicator:

Displays the system's current state, most likely a couple of LEDs indicating progress/completion of tuning.

## USB Interface:

Establishes communication between the MCU and computer. This component may also be built into the MCU.

## Software:

Logs the data gathered by the MCU for future use over the USB connection. The position of the metal ball and phase shift will be recorded for analysis.

## Test Bed:

We will have a small (~ 1 foot) proof of concept accelerator for the purposes of testing. It will be supplied by Starfire with the required hardware for testing. This can be left in the lab for us to use as needed. The final demonstration will be with a full-size accelerator.

# Criterion For Success:

- Demonstrate successful field characterization within the resonant cavities on a full-sized accelerator.

- Data will be logged on a PC for later use.

- Characterization completion will be faster than current methods.

- The device would not need any input from an operator until completion.

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