Project: EEG

The semester just ended, and as my final project for EE40 (circuits), I created an EEG device to measure voltage changes from a person's brain. The signals are on the order of microvolts and contain a lot of noise, so the device basically had to amplify the signal to the order of volts and remove as much noise as possible. The circuit was designed, prototyped on breadboards, and then the PCB was fabricated and stuffed. It consists of an instrumentation amp, DC block (high pass filter with really low cutoff frequency), active low pass filter, and two cascaded 60 Hz notch filters. It is powered by 2 9V batteries and has adjustable gain. My partner and I tested it on our professor's head and it worked! Anyways, it was a pretty fun project; I plan on experimenting with more of this stuff later on. If you want to get into EEG projects yourself, a good resource is OpenEEG: http://openeeg.sourceforge.net/doc/
Thanks to my partner Eugene for his work on the project, and thanks to TI for free op amps!

Project Update: CubeSat

I figured with the conclusion of the Microsoft Robotics @ Home Competition, I should post updates to some other projects I'm working on.

I'm currently the project lead for a small team of students at UC Berkeley developing a tiny satellite, called a CubeSat. One advantage of CubeSats is that instead of having one big, expensive satellite getting data from one point, you can have many cheap, small satellites collecting data over a really wide area. Also, many CubeSats can be packed into rockets as a secondary payload, which reduces costs.

So far, I've mainly been doing design and prototyping. Most of the circuitry is still in the design phase and I haven't ordered the PCBs yet. You can see a picture of the structure below. (Thanks to Sam Cohen for doing a custom design in SolidWorks!) It was cut by a CNC waterjet in the Etcheverry machine shop. You can also see a little prototype electrical system with a microcontroller, camera, microSD card port, and temperature sensor. Right now, I'm working on designing the power system, command and data handling system, as well as setting up a communication system using ham radio. I hope to have my team conduct a high altitude balloon test by the end of the next school year.

If you would like to know more or if you're a student at Berkeley and want to get involved or you represent a company and are interested in sponsoring our project, please contact me: About Me -> View my complete profile -> Contact me

Disclaimer: This is a student group project and is not managed or organized by the University.

Project Update: Microsoft Robotics @ Home Competition Entry

I've submitted my entry for the Microsoft Robotics @ Home Competition. Thanks to Microsoft for giving me this great opportunity to compete as a finalist!

Check out my video here:

Project Update: Microsoft Robotics @ Home Competition

Hello everyone, sorry for the lack of recent updates. I have been swamped with school work, but fortunately I am now on Spring Break and can devote more time to this project. After going through loads of documentation and tutorials, I can say the learning curve for RDS4 is pretty steep as there are a lot of different components, but the functionality it offers is powerful. I'm currently focusing on writing code to work with the Kinect, which I'll need for the facial recognition part of my overall algorithm. I'll post more updates and a video/demonstration in the coming weeks. One tip I'd give to anyone who is going to start working with the EDDIE, is that you must daisy chain the encoders, otherwise you will only get error messages from the control board. The documentation could be a little more clear in this regard, so pay special attention to this when doing your wiring.

Project Update: Microsoft Robotics @ Home Competition

I'm competing in the Microsoft Robotics @ Home competition as 1 of 10 finalists, and a couple weeks ago I finished assembling the robot they shipped me. The goal of the competition is to write software to run on the Eddie robot platform that allows the robot to help people in their homes. I'm working on writing code to allow the Eddie robot to serve as a security guard by conducting autonomous patrolling around the home. It will use the Kinect sensor for facial recognition to determine if people it detects in your home are just friends or family or actually potential robbers. I'm also working on getting the robot to use the home's Wi-Fi network to make Skype calls so it can alert the home owners if it detects unfamiliar people.

For more information on the Microsoft Robotics @ Home Competition: http://www.roboticsathome.com/
For more info on the Parallax Eddie Robot: http://www.parallax.com/eddie

Here's a picture of the robot fully assembled! Now, back to the software...

Welcome!

Hello and welcome to my new blog! I'll be using this to post updates to the various projects I am currently working on.