Turn it up to 11!
Recently, Kevin Radley, made a pair of speakers out of two broken hard drives he acquired (one being an old damaged hard drive Kevin Hamilton gave to me to retrieve some data, but OIT didn’t allow me to use the machines. He also took a headphone jack I had from an old pair of headphones). Since speakers produce sound by vibrating motion using an electromagnets, simply using the jack input to his computer, and plugging in the right, left audio channels and ground, soldering the wires on the magnet. The hard drives are now fully functioning speakers, but the only problem is that the sound is hard to hear. I am designing the amplification circuitry and eventually the filters to produce a tweeter and a subwoofer effect with the hard drives. The idea would be to construct three filters, a low pass, a high pass and a notch filter. The circuit so far is simple, using a LM386 IC and a few passive components, for maximum of 20dB gain.
Electromagnetic Interference
My junior year Digital Signal Processing course final project consisting of taking a signal that was corrupted with some noise, identify the noise and then create the appropriate filter to clean the signal. It turns out the filter needed to eliminate a power line hum. The last month of classes, I was amused to have found a Electromagnetic Interference filter from equipment that the Clarkson TV station was throwing away. The final project can be found on the Code section under Matlab section or directly at:
http://people.clarkson.edu/~estradjm/matlab.html
Earth-Moon-Earth Transmission (Moon Bounce)
Pushing radio to another level, the Ham Radio club is interested in doing a moon bounce before the year is over. The details are in the making and the clock is clicking. Since the year ended and K2CC wasn’t able to finish, we are planning on making an alteration to our original plan. We will be doing a Moon Bounce communication with Greg Zenger, former President of K2CC (2008-09), who now works down in Connecticut for General Dynamics Electric Boat on RF. That will give us a chance to cover some distance instead of transmitting and receiving to ourselves a few yards away. Greg recently graduated, and we have to wait for his equipment to get in order, as well as finish our project on campus before we can perform this.
K2CC and Greg have coordinated to have the EME transmission done one weekend night and happened to have it land the day after a meteor shower. The side intent was to bounce the waves off a meteor, which sounds easier said than done. I regret to inform that we were not successful in our attempts at communicating with Greg in Connecticut. It was a good time by all, as being at night in the dead of winter and in the lawn next to the townhouses, we drew a small crowd. Greg Linder, in an attempt to improve communications, held the antenna up to his thigh as we gazed for possible meteors and questions as to his ability to reproduce rose as the antenna transmitted and exposed him to microwaves, although only 5 Watts.
Sound is just a bunch of Sine Waves!
Using music theory and signal processing techniques, for my junior Systems and Signal Processing final project, two other group members and I created a song strictly using Matlab. The final song can be found under the Code section in Matlab section or directly at:
http://people.clarkson.edu/~estradjm/matlab.html
Focus!
Computer Vision, focal points, blur and deblur, cameras, computer vision, Image processing and digital signal processing. Partial Differential equations such as the non-generating heat equation, have a wide range of uses, from modeling the dissipation of a fluid in a medium such as sprayed molecules in air to the sharpening of images. Matlab has the ability to work with images in a wide range of formats and surprisingly enough, it takes them in as three dimensional arrays that can be easily worked with. The only problem to Matlab is it’s slow speed when working with such a large amount of number crunching and it’s ability to display back these images in real time, which is why it will be later coded to be done in C++.
There is a project for Boundary Value Problems that myself and two other partners worked on that briefly explains the 2-D heat equation:
Numerical Methods Video
Putting the Hard in Hardware!
Using Altera’s DE1 development board and VHDL, Greg Zenger and I designed a few projects interacting with the DE1 board’s SRAM and user input devices such as a keypad and PS/2 Keyboard. Some of the VHDL code I salvaged is posted on the VHDL subsection of the CODE section. Not all Advanced Digital Design projects are posted in order not to encourage cheating, as these projects are still in use for the class. Any questions, feel free to contact me.
Teaching an Old Computer New Tricks
This is an extremely long term project undergoing at home. The first laptop my family owned. Dad got the Toshiba Satellite model 1135-S1553. The laptop has had recent hardware and software issues, stemming from an unresponsive keyboard to entering an endless loop while booting, among the most prominent.
My plan is to not only make this laptop functional again, but to customize it and bring it to the modern standards of a potent machine. I plan to invent a new translucent case for the circuitry potentially using lacquer or Epoxy as a seal, making the laptop case robust. Minor tweaks also include a more suitable amount of HDD space and RAM, possibly a new cooling/fan system and backlit LED keyboard design (DVORAK just to annoy anyone wanting to use my laptop). I am also juggling the idea of a camera lens on the computer much like the MacBook. For some reason people like incredibly useless and silly features like that. I will also be tinkering around with the idea of Biometrics and Bioinformatics in the form of a print scanner or maybe using the camera to ID and log on and ways to break the system.
Research into Peltier and water cooling, use of liquid Nitrogen and Epoxy to engineer a way to make the system that is internal and potentially waterproof, although a lot more problems arise from those concepts than they really solve. I thought I solved the peltier problem by making them into a loop, but a gamer told me off on the practicality of the idea. Some people take gaming PC too seriously. Investments on a good motherboard and maybe a waterproof Keyboard might be required. Some Motherboards have the ability to come designed for the graphics cards to be removed and replaced. Alienware and ASUS has been known to do this.
ASUS has come out with a laptop that is the most customizable in the market, ASUS C90S, consisting of a case, LCD, motherboard, keyboard and mouse. The user has the control on the RAM, HDD, and a few others tweaks. This computer ranges around $700 to $800, which seems a bit pricey for a bare bones computer.
Power Issues
The problem with computer power cords are their nature to have connections fail near the computer connection port. To remedy this problem, the use of Anderson Powerpoles was thrown around. Toshiba uses the standard I/O for the laptop power connectors, whereas other companies like Dell have been said to have a pin to check if the cord is the right one or flow of data (although the idea of data in a power cable seems wrong, we will give them the benefit of the doubt for now). This same mod for connectors was performed by a colleague on his Toshiba Portege not too long ago. Another interesting thing about the current design of the Toshiba Satellite was the power connector port being right next to the fan exhaust for the processor, which is the case with the Compaq Presario V2000. Not the smartest move for engineering a case, because the large, constant heat the computer emits onto the power cord causing solder joint failures often with the cords, a problem with heat dissipation that can be fixed relatively easy with rerouting within the new case. Not surprising considering the design is pretty much taking a hot air gun to your power connector!
