Senior Design Projects
If you are interested in any of the Senior Design Projects I propose below, please
contact me.
Project suggestions by other faculty can be found on the
ECE 492 web page.
Senior Design Projects
I'm interested in advising senior design projects on the following topics.
- Development of a Programable Passive Radio Frequency Identification Tag (RFID).
The common passive RFID tags are currently only able to respond with their hardcoded ID to a request by a reader. However, UHF readers emit enough power to the tags allowing them to perform additional functions. This makes it possible to add memory and sensors to the tags. This opens up a wealth of new applications for RFID. The goal of this project is to develop a passive RFID tag which is controlled by a simple ultra-low power microcontroller. The tag should be able to sense light level and temperature of its environment and relay this information back to the RFID reader. The paper A Wirelessly-Powered Platform for Sensing and Computation describes such a tag.
This project requires knowledge of analog circuit design as well as digital circuit design and microprocessor programming.
Currently in Progress
- Reconfigurable Wireless Sensor Node
A wireless sensor network is a system of individual sensor nodes, each equipped with a processor, wireless transceiver and sensor. Each node collects information about its environment and passes it on to the base station. Sensor nodes use for example ATMEL microcontrollers (MCU) to process the data and handle the network protocol. The software that is controlling the MCU can be updated wirelessly. However, changes and improvements to the MCU are not possible as this would require a hardware change. Especially cryptoalgorithms in software put a high burden on the MCU. Hence, previous senior design projects tried to "Outsource" this task to a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA). They discovered that even though this speeds up the algorithm, it could run even faster if it would be possible to integrate it with the MCU. Current serial or 8-bit parallel interfaces of the MCUs are the bottle neck. The aim of this project is to replace the entire MCU with an FPGA and put a soft-core MCU on the FPGA.
- EducaTable, Interactive Surface to Support Elementary School Teaching
An interactive surface is a device similar to a graphical user interface (GUI), however the
user manipulates it with one (Touchscreen) or more fingers (Multitouch) and by placing
everyday objects on the screen and manipulating these objects (Surface Computing). This leads
itself naturally to a table style design where users can place objects and also use their fingers.
This idea is not new and has been used for the Microsoft Surface
and for the ReacTable. The goal of this project is to build a
kid-friendly interactive surface and develop an application targeted to educating elementary
school students.
- Design of an FPGA-based Hardware Platform to Support Software-defined Radio
Description to be added.
- Behavioral Algorithm Sensor Suite (BASS)
The objective of the BASS system is to facilitate research and applications in the area of behavioral robotics. The platform provides spatial awareness, physical orientation, and other data in order to provide a specific behavior. In addition, the system will make use of digital hardware and digital signal processing to improve the reliability and use of the data collected as well as provide the necessary control capabilities.
Previous Senior Design Projects
K. Rizvi, J. Pham, M. McDermott, and R. Brown,
Energy and power comparison of cryptographic algorithms on sensor nodes,
George Mason University,
Fairfax, VA, USA,
May,
2009,
Senior Design Project Report [
pdf] [
Bibtex]
B. Thomson, J. McCall, and S. Kaur,
Cryptographic coprocessor for wireless sensors,
George Mason University,
Fairfax, VA, USA,
December,
2008,
Senior Design Project Report [
pdf] [
Bibtex]
J. Higgins, P. Patel, and P. Anderson,
PDIS – Print data insertion system,
George Mason University,
Fairfax, VA, USA,
April,
2008,
Senior Design Project Report [
pdf] [
Bibtex]
(Outstanding ECE Senior Design Project Award)