Project

# Title Team Members TA Documents Sponsor
7 Garden Guardian
 Aleah Gacek
Claire McGrath
Nick Hartmann
 Jason Zhang design_document1.pdf
design_document2.pdf
final_paper1.pdf
presentation1.pdf
proposal2.pdf
proposal1.pdf
video
Problem:

Gardens are an easy and fun hobby that a lot of people have in their backyard. One issue when it comes to gardens is being able to protect them. Gardens grow many different fruits and vegetables that are prone to getting attacked or eaten by different animals. Having a hindrance would improve the garden's quality and protect your plants.

Solution Overview:

Our solution for deterring animals away from one’s garden is a portable battery-powered (most likely solar) device that can be mounted above one’s garden. It uses a passive infrared sensor that notices movement in the garden area.

Solution Components:

Sensor System:

Passive infrared system for detecting movement in the area which triggers a high signal to the 5-volt relay (connect to 120V compatible noise/light deterrent)

Power System:

Solar panels -> battery storage -> PCB -> 5-volt relay (5-volt to 120 AC conversion) -> light/noise deterrent

Processing System:

PCB sends signal to light/noise deterrent and can determine night=light deterrent and day=noise deterrent; compatible/controlled with Arduino

Criterion for Success:

Our device can pick up on animal movement in the area around the garden and turn on the light/noise deterrent to scare the animal away and protect the garden while running on solar power.

Alternatives:

An easy deterrent against large animals is putting a wired fence around your garden. This doesn’t work against birds or smaller animals. This also is quite annoying for the garden owner to have to move the fence each time they want to work on the garden.

Another alternative is using an ultrasonic animal repeller. This device emits a certain frequency that deters animals away while also not at a frequency that humans can hear. A problem with this is that there is not a ‘general frequency’ that deters all animals away. You can only set it to one frequency that deters certain animals. We think our device would be better because it would deter all animals.



Assistive Chessboard

Robert Kaufman, Rushi Patel, William Sun

Assistive Chessboard

Featured Project

Problem: It can be difficult for a new player to learn chess, especially if they have no one to play with. They would have to resort to online guides which can be distracting when playing with a real board. If they have no one to play with, they would again have to resort to online games which just don't have the same feel as real boards.

Proposal: We plan to create an assistive chess board. The board will have the following features:

-The board will be able to suggest a move by lighting up the square of the move-to space and square under the piece to move.

-The board will light up valid moves when a piece is picked up and flash the placed square if it is invalid.

-We will include a chess clock for timed play with stop buttons for players to signal the end of their turn.

-The player(s) will be able to select different standard time set-ups and preferences for the help displayed by the board.

Implementation Details: The board lights will be an RGB LED under each square of the board. Each chess piece will have a magnetic base which can be detected by a magnetic field sensor under each square. Each piece will have a different strength magnet inside it to ID which piece is what (ie. 6 different magnet sizes for the 6 different types of pieces). Black and white pieces will be distinguished by the polarity of the magnets. The strength and polarity will be read by the same magnetic field sensor under each square. The lights will have different colors for the different piece that it is representing as well as for different signals (ie. An invalid move will flash red).

The chess clock will consist of a 7-segment display in the form of (h:mm:ss) and there will be 2 stop buttons, one for each side, to signal when a player’s turn is over. A third button will be featured near the clock to act as a reset button. The combination of the two stop switches and reset button will be used to select the time mode for the clock. Each side of the board will also have a two toggle-able buttons or switches to control whether move help or suggested moves should be enabled on that side of the board. The state of the decision will be shown by a lit or unlit LED light near the relevant switch.

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