My 4th year project is a 2-piece bike computer which includes tracking capabilities, has an interactive touch screen and an automatic transmission. The unit consists of 2 main components, a detachable top portion containing the screen, battery and other electronics and the automatic transmission assembly that stays attached to bike and serves as a mount to the top assembly.

My portion of the project includes designing the hardware to implement the automatic transmission control logic. This includes designing a custom PCB with custom and references circuit designs to run the motors to change the gears, keep track of the control loop state (temperature of motors, current draw, position feedback) and communicate this information with the master controller.

My third year, 4-month project, was a proof of concept of an interactive LED light table using more discrete components than a series of fancy IC's that would otherwise combine all the functions into a single chip. The project consisted of 2 TI MSP430 MCU’s that communicated over SPI, one was the master driving the grid of RGB LED’s, the other oversaw handling the IR data. I implemented the 8x8 RGB display.

The second controller used multiplexers and shift registers to activate and read each row of IR LED’s and record the value. Each cell has an IR receiver LED and transmitter. After taking all the information calculating where the object is on the table, the coordinate information as in the form of colours and location is sent to the master controller which then displays the content.

The master controllers multiplex the 8x8 grid of RGB LED’s by using 2 MAXIM 6969 integrated shift register and LED driver chips in series. 24 of the 32 outputs are used to control the RGB colours of all the rows, the last 8 outputs activate the columns to toggle which row is on and displaying the information. It takes 15 milliseconds to display 1 from on the grid which is the refresh rate and is repeated to hold the image on the display.

As a part of a small team containing class mates from IEEE Carleton and members of the IEEE Ottawa Section, a new initiative was started to work with the kids of CLK (Christie Lake Kids Foundation) and create a plan to better the facilities at the camp through the IEEE EPICS Grant (Engineering Projects in Community Service program). A solar water heating system was decided on to provide hot water and renewable energy for one of the student cabins.

I was the designer who researched and designed the AC and DC electrical system as well as minor plumbing to IEEE which was than granted the requested $22,000 USD to construct the project. When designing the system, I made sure to research and adhere to both Canadian Electrical Code and code that pertains to solar electrical systems as well as keeping in mind the environment this system would be in. This makes the project the highest funded project of this nature in region 7. The project is ongoing with the interior plumbing and water heating being done spring 2017.