Project

# Title Team Members TA Documents Sponsor
4 Agricultural Drone Refilling System
 Aditi Adya
Batu Palanduz
Steffi Chen
 Yixuan Wang design_document1.pdf
final_paper1.pdf
photo1.png
photo2.png
presentation1.pdf
proposal1.pdf
# Team Members
- Batu Palanduz (batup2)
- Aditi Adya (aditiaa2)
- Steffi Chen (steffic2)

# Problem
With many agricultural drones, the sprayer tank needs to be manually refilled rather than having an automated system. While this does not pose a problem if there are a small number of drones, as the fleet size increases, tank refilling will take up more and more time, questioning the efficiency of this current system. This will result in a decrease in productivity as more time will be spent refilling the tanks instead of operating the drones or taking care of other tasks, such as analyzing the data collected from the drones and performing maintenance on various equipment to give a few examples.

# Solution Overview
An automated refilling system would relieve this issue by refilling the empty sprayer tanks without human intervention. This would free up the farmer and enable the drone fleet to operate more efficiently by reducing the downtime caused by waiting for an empty tank to be refilled. The refilling system would consist of a gantry that contains the refilling nozzle, camera, distance sensor, and pumping hardware needed to align the nozzle to the fill port on the drone's tank and refill it. Additionally, a computer and microprocessor would be needed to handle the image processing from the camera and control the gantry motors, respectively. Visual markers can be used to determine the location of the fill port, as well as the distance to the fill port, using image processing. The distance sensor would act as a backup to ensure that the gantry does not accidentally crash into the drone if the image processing fails to correctly determine the distance to the drone.

# Solution Systems
**Refilling System**
- Tank Subsystem - Has a fluid monitor which signals to the control system if the refilling station needs refilling
- Dispensing Subsystem - Has a distance sensor, nozzle, and hose which handles delivering the fluid to the drone
- Gantry Subsystem - Uses stepper motors to move the dispensing subsystem in a controlled and precise manner. Has stepper motor drivers to power the stepper motors
- Computer Vision System - Uses a Raspberry Pi for image processing and a camera for accurately aligning the dispensing subsystem with the drone’s fill port
- Control Subsystem - Controls gantry movement and monitors the refilling process to prevent drone overfilling. Also monitors the tank subsystem’s fluid level and displays a notification if the tank needs refilling

**Drone Replica**
- Represents a replica of the important parts of the drone: wing/fuselage area around the fill port, fill port, visual markers, tank with fluid level sensor, refill the status display

**Power System**
- Includes an AC/DC power supply and off-shelf voltage regulator(s) to provide the needed voltages for the subsystems

# Criterion for Success
Our solution will be able to accurately refill water into the tanks of the drones. The detailed criterion for success is as follows:
Precisely recognize the entry port to the water tank and line up to the tank port
Make sure there is minimal to no amount of extra spillage around the water tank while connecting, filling, and disconnecting
Correctly sense when the tank is filling up so that the refilling system does not overfill it or stop at the wrong time
Send a signal to the drone to show that it is done being refilled

# Anticipated Difficulties
Some of the anticipated difficulties revolve around the integration between the hardware and software aspects of the project. Troubleshooting and debugging the gantry movement and alignment will take a long time as there are many sources of error that need to be accounted for, including slop in the mechanical system, repeatability, and any design oversights/errors. Difficulties with the software aspect might include difficulties reliably identifying the visual markers in different lighting conditions, dirt or other debris obstructing the visual markers, potentially steep learning curves to image processing/recognition, and reducing the computational power required to minimize costs.

Phone Audio FM Transmitter

Madigan Carroll, Dan Piper, James Wozniak

Phone Audio FM Transmitter

Featured Project

# Phone Audio FM Transmitter

Team Members:

James Wozniak (jamesaw)

Madigan Carroll (mac18)

Dan Piper (depiper2)

# Problem

In cars with older stereo systems, there are no easy ways to play music from your phone as the car lacks Bluetooth or other audio connections. There exist small FM transmitters that circumvent this problem by broadcasting the phone audio on some given FM wavelength. The main issue with these is that they must be manually tuned to find an open wavelength, a process not easily or safely done while driving.

# Solution

Our solution is to build upon these preexisting devices, but add the functionality of automatically switching the transmitter’s frequency, creating a safer and more enjoyable experience. For this to work, several components are needed: a Bluetooth connection to send audio signals from the phone to the device, an FM receiver and processing unit to find the best wavelength to transmit on, and an FM transmitter to send the audio signals to be received by the car stereo.

# Solution Components

## Subsystem 1 - Bluetooth Interface

This system connects the user’s phone, or other bluetooth device to our project. It should be a standalone module that handles all the bluetooth functions, and outputs an audio signal that will be modulated and transmitted by the FM Transmitter. Note: this subsystem may be included in the microcontroller.

## Subsystem 2 - FM Transmitter

This module will transmit the audio signal output by our bluetooth module. It will modulate the signal to FM frequency chosen by the control system. Therefore, the transmitting frequency must be able to be tuned electronically.

## Subsystem 3 - FM Receiver

This module will receive an FM signal. It must be able to be adjusted electronically (not with a mechanical potentiometer) with a signal from the control system. It does not need to fully demodulate the signal, as we only need to measure the power in the signal. Note: if may choose to have a single transceiver, in which case the receiver subsystem and the transmitter subsystem will be combined into a single subsystem.

## Subsystem 4 - Control System

The control system will consist of a microcontroller and surrounding circuitry, capable of reading the power output of the FM receiver, and outputting a signal to adjust the receiving frequency, in order to scan the FM band. We will write and upload a program to determine the most suitable frequency. It will then output a signal to the FM transmitter to adjust the transmitting frequency to the band determined above. We are planning on using the ESP32-S3-WROOM-1 microcontroller given its built-in Bluetooth module and low power usage.

## Subsystem 5 - Power

Our device is designed to be used in a car, so It must be able to be powered by a standard automobile auxiliary power outlet which provides 12-13V DC and usually at least 100W. This should be more than sufficient. We plan to purchase a connector that can be plugged into this port, with leads that we can wire to our circuit.

# Criterion for Success

The device can pair with a phone via bluetooth and receive an audio signal from a phone.

The Device transmits an FM signal capable of being detected by a standard fm radio

The Device can receive FM signals and scan the FM bands.

The digital algorithm is able to compare the strength of different channels and determine the optimal channel.

The device is able to automatically switch the transmitting channel to the predetermined best channel when the user pushes a button.