Ideas for an exciting (and difficult) electronics project
March 14, 2011 9:36 AM Subscribe
What are some reasonably complex and conceptually interesting electronics projects that I can make for my class?
I'm taking an electronics lab course in college and we have a final project where we are tasked with basically building something interesting that is complicated enough to be challenging and to illustrate some level of circuit design and creativity (i.e. not just built straight off of a design found online).
To give you an idea of what type of things they are looking for, some poplar projects in the past have been: a theramin, an EKG heart monitor, laser microphone/laser sound transmission, a laser harp, a bat detector (shifts ultrasonic frequencies into audible range), etc. Someone has even built an interface for controlling a simple game with brain waves, but I'm not sure how difficult that would be.
We can use a combination of analog circuits and software (LabView) for our project, so some of the more complex signal analysis type things can be done on the software side of things.
So let me know any ideas, suggestions, or resources, or experience that you have to share. Thanks!
I'm taking an electronics lab course in college and we have a final project where we are tasked with basically building something interesting that is complicated enough to be challenging and to illustrate some level of circuit design and creativity (i.e. not just built straight off of a design found online).
To give you an idea of what type of things they are looking for, some poplar projects in the past have been: a theramin, an EKG heart monitor, laser microphone/laser sound transmission, a laser harp, a bat detector (shifts ultrasonic frequencies into audible range), etc. Someone has even built an interface for controlling a simple game with brain waves, but I'm not sure how difficult that would be.
We can use a combination of analog circuits and software (LabView) for our project, so some of the more complex signal analysis type things can be done on the software side of things.
So let me know any ideas, suggestions, or resources, or experience that you have to share. Thanks!
our "final" in digital electronics lab was "do something to amaze us". This was after building an 8-bit machine (RAM, clock, CPU, etc) over the semester
Granted, we had no software emulators or other aids, just battery backed RAM and a hex keypad for data entry.
Pong would have been great (since we had earlier hooked the 'scope up and learned how to drive it) ... But I lacked the time to program it.
So, yeah, Pong..
posted by k5.user at 10:24 AM on March 14, 2011
Granted, we had no software emulators or other aids, just battery backed RAM and a hex keypad for data entry.
Pong would have been great (since we had earlier hooked the 'scope up and learned how to drive it) ... But I lacked the time to program it.
So, yeah, Pong..
posted by k5.user at 10:24 AM on March 14, 2011
This (linked from MeFi) is a) interesting; b) a novel application; c) evidence of some degree of signal-processing sophistication. Anything that assists in showing some facet of the environment that is not well known is fascinating to some people, like me.
If you could make the beginnings of a coley instrument it would interest a lot of people, prove that you could recognize some elements of dynamic SP, and be very cool.
posted by jet_silver at 2:34 PM on March 14, 2011
If you could make the beginnings of a coley instrument it would interest a lot of people, prove that you could recognize some elements of dynamic SP, and be very cool.
posted by jet_silver at 2:34 PM on March 14, 2011
I've been wanting to build a couple of things that are currently beyond my limitations:
- a LED matrix sitting under the glass of my coffee table that lets you play pong.
- a pedal or stepping controller for movement in computer games (I figured you could set up some sort of infrared or magnetic detector near your shoes or near pedals that have an emitter on them, and each time the detector registers the emitter passing, it "presses" the w key or the up arrow on a keyboard (I don't know, maybe just hack into the keyboard and put some wires across that key, which connect with a switch.)
- a lamp that dims and brightens according to change in your heart rate. You could hack up a basic running heart-rate monitor, use a microcontroller with wifi access, and some sort of X11 dimmer control on the lamp. Then when you get sleepy and your heartrate slows, your lamp turns off; if you start dancing round the room, it brightens.
posted by lollusc at 5:35 PM on March 14, 2011
- a LED matrix sitting under the glass of my coffee table that lets you play pong.
- a pedal or stepping controller for movement in computer games (I figured you could set up some sort of infrared or magnetic detector near your shoes or near pedals that have an emitter on them, and each time the detector registers the emitter passing, it "presses" the w key or the up arrow on a keyboard (I don't know, maybe just hack into the keyboard and put some wires across that key, which connect with a switch.)
- a lamp that dims and brightens according to change in your heart rate. You could hack up a basic running heart-rate monitor, use a microcontroller with wifi access, and some sort of X11 dimmer control on the lamp. Then when you get sleepy and your heartrate slows, your lamp turns off; if you start dancing round the room, it brightens.
posted by lollusc at 5:35 PM on March 14, 2011
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posted by Diplodocus at 10:10 AM on March 14, 2011