Hardware

Hardware Resources

The Srivastava Senior Design Lab has a wide variety of hardware available for use in projects, including microcontrollers, DSP boards, LINX RF transmitters and receivers, GPS units, webcams and more. These things can all be checked out from you TA for use on your project. See below for more details, and check out the links above.

Development Boards

Intel Galileo Development Boards

The lab has 25 Intel Galileo Development Boards available for checkout. The following links are useful resources for working with these boards:

Microcontrollers

PIC Microcontrollers

The lab has a number of PIC16F877A microcontrollers available for use in projects. It is understandable that wiring errors might happen, so each student is allowed to burn out a maximum of two PICs. They are programmed in a simplified C instruction set and are used to simplify design and perform IO with ease. Check the PIC Tutorial for more information.

BASIC Stamp Microcontrollers

The BASIC Stamp is a simple, tiny microcontroller with serial communications abilities, programmed in BASIC. This makes it ideal for simple applications where I/O speed is not critical, and the complexity of the HC12 is not needed.

DSPs

TI TMS320C54x DSPs

We have several C54x DSPs available for checkout (if demand is high, sharing a DSP with another group may be needed). Check out these resources for more information:

TI TMS320C6713 DSP

We have one TMS320C6713 (16 Mb) Floating Point DSP that was graciously donated by TI. The board is in the TA cabinet and is available for checkout.

LINX RF modules

We have a number of LINX transmitters and receivers available in the lab for RF projects, with a choice of the LC Series (315 or 418 MHz) or the HP series (902-928 MHz band).

GPS kits

We have 2-3 Garmin 12 XL GPS receivers. The Garmin units are equipped with a serial communication port and can be interfaced with microcontrollers or computers to provide information on position (lat, long, altitude, time) and velocity (differentiation of position). We also have one equivalent Motorola kit, and another kit by Ashtech (Eval and development kit, 990285). There are antennas on the roof of EL with wires into the lab so that data can be acquired while in the building (for testing purposes). The antennas can be accessed through connectors in the back left corner of the lab, by the far computer.

S.I.P. (Smart Irrigation Project)

Jackson Lenz, James McMahon

S.I.P. (Smart Irrigation Project)

Featured Project

Jackson Lenz

James McMahon

Our project is to be a reliable, robust, and intelligent irrigation controller for use in areas where reliable weather prediction, water supply, and power supply are not found.

Upon completion of the project, our device will be able to determine the moisture level of the soil, the water level in a water tank, and the temperature, humidity, insolation, and barometric pressure of the environment. It will perform some processing on the observed environmental factors to determine if rain can be expected soon, Comparing this knowledge to the dampness of the soil and the amount of water in reserves will either trigger a command to begin irrigation or maintain a command to not irrigate the fields. This device will allow farmers to make much more efficient use of precious water and also avoid dehydrating crops to death.

In developing nations, power is also of concern because it is not as readily available as power here in the United States. For that reason, our device will incorporate several amp-hours of energy storage in the form of rechargeable, maintenance-free, lead acid batteries. These batteries will charge while power is available from the grid and discharge when power is no longer available. This will allow for uninterrupted control of irrigation. When power is available from the grid, our device will be powered by the grid. At other times, the batteries will supply the required power.

The project is titled S.I.P. because it will reduce water wasted and will be very power efficient (by extremely conservative estimates, able to run for 70 hours without input from the grid), thus sipping on both power and water.

We welcome all questions and comments regarding our project in its current form.

Thank you all very much for you time and consideration!