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: