Project

# Title Team Members TA Documents Sponsor
49 Smart autochasing lamp
 Feiyang Liu
Jincheng Yu
Yiyan Zhang
 Luoyan Li design_document1.pdf
design_document2.pdf
final_paper1.pdf
other1.pptx
proposal2.pdf
proposal1.pdf
video
# **Team Members**

Feiyang Liu (feiyang5)

Yiyan Zhang (yiyanz3)

Jincheng Yu (jy54)


# **Problem**

When performing precise tasks on a desk, such as soldering or assembling LEGO, the position of the lamp can often be a source of frustration. Shadows cast by the hands can obscure the parts you're searching for, and tiny components in your hands may not be sufficiently illuminated, leading to discomfort and inefficiency. Furthermore, my ceiling light broke last week, and I've had to rely solely on a desk lamp for illumination. In such a dark environment, the brightness of the desk lamp is overwhelming and strains my eyes. There's a need for a desk lamp that can adjust its brightness and color temperature according to external light conditions. Additionally, the traditional ways of controlling desk lamps are inconvenient, often interrupting our workflow to make adjustments.

# **Solution**
We propose a smart desk lamp equipped with a camera and several servo motors forming a mechanical arm. This lamp can capture images and communicate with a computer for image processing. It can identify human hands and move the lamp closer and at an angle to the hands as they move, minimizing large shadows on the desk. Through a photoresistor, it can respond to changes in external light sources. The camera can also detect specific hand gestures, such as opening the thumb and forefinger to increase brightness or pinching them to decrease brightness. These gestures can also control the computer or play music, which I believe is simpler than voice input.

# **Subsystem**
## Mechanical Arm Subsystem:
Three servo motors and linear potentiometers ensure the basic movement of the mechanical arm, with additional circuits for these components. To avoid interference between light sources, a small aperture for the light-sensitive element will be located on the mechanical arm. This data is communicated to the central control subsystem.

## Lighting and Camera Subsystem:
The lighting bulb, adjustable in terms of color temperature and brightness, receives instructions from the central control system. A camera is positioned near the bulb for better target tracking. Captured information is sent to the central controller.
## Central Control Subsystem:
This system integrates the ESP32 module and necessary I/O modules. It needs to process images captured by the camera, determine how much each motor in the mechanical arm should move to track the bulb and be sensitive to specific gestures to adjust various parameters of the bulb. It can also communicate remotely with a computer to control specific programs.

# **Standard of Success**
When tracking mode is activated, the bulb moves to an appropriate position following the hand's movement.

As the ambient light changes, the bulb adjusts to the appropriate brightness and color temperature.

The lamp's switch and brightness can be adjusted through gestures.

Specific programs (like Spotify) can be opened on the computer through hand gestures.

Smart Frisbee

Ryan Moser, Blake Yerkes, James Younce

Smart Frisbee

Featured Project

The idea of this project would be to improve upon the 395 project ‘Smart Frisbee’ done by a group that included James Younce. The improvements would be to create a wristband with low power / short range RF capabilities that would be able to transmit a user ID to the frisbee, allowing the frisbee to know what player is holding it. Furthermore, the PCB from the 395 course would be used as a point of reference, but significantly redesigned in order to introduce the transceiver, a high accuracy GPS module, and any other parts that could be modified to decrease power consumption. The frisbee’s current sensors are a GPS module, and an MPU 6050, which houses an accelerometer and gyroscope.

The software of the system on the frisbee would be redesigned and optimized to record various statistics as well as improve gameplay tracking features for teams and individual players. These statistics could be player specific events such as the number of throws, number of catches, longest throw, fastest throw, most goals, etc.

The new hardware would improve the frisbee’s ability to properly moderate gameplay and improve “housekeeping”, such as ensuring that an interception by the other team in the end zone would not be counted as a score. Further improvements would be seen on the software side, as the frisbee in it’s current iteration will score as long as the frisbee was thrown over the endzone, and the only way to eliminate false goals is to press a button within a 10 second window after the goal.