Project

# Title Team Members TA Documents Sponsor
62 Automated Multi-Cat Feeder
 Lingxiang Cai
Omolola Okesanjo
Qingyuan Liu
 Nithin Balaji Shanthini Praveena Purushothaman design_document2.pdf
final_paper1.pdf
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presentation1.pdf
proposal2.pdf
ECE 445 (SENIOR DESIGN PROJECT) REQUEST FOR APPROVAL

Team Members:

Omolola okesanjo (omolola2)

Lingxiang Cai (lcai15)

Qingyuan Liu (ql21)

PROBLEM

A cat feeder. Lots of pet owners (cat owners especially) have different cats at home, moreso different breeds. When these owners are not home or are away, feeding them becomes difficult especially with different diets and different nutritional needs. There needs to be a way to measure nutritional needs of different pets and feed them according to those needs, where the owner is at home or not.

SOLUTION

To solve this problem, we want to build an automated cat feeder system with an identification system for the different cats/pets. This system dispenses food for each cat according to their planned diet and nutritional needs. We incorporate a feeder system to dispense food, an RFID system to identify each cat before dispensing and a timer that works with the feeder system.

SOLUTION COMPONENTS
FEEDER SYSTEM

This is a mechanical system that is integrated with the RFID and timer system. After identifying which cat needs food and based on the timing needs of the cat diet, the motor dispenses the right food mixture and the right quatity into the bowl for the cat to eat. The circuit is going to be integrated with the RFID on a microcontroller on a PCB.

RFID SYSTEM

When a cat comes to the system for food, the RFID system is used to read data (based on a chip on the cat) to see which breed, types of food the cat needs, quantity, etc.

TIMER/CLOCK

This is to set a regular time to determine when the dispenser should dispense food because we don't want our cat over eating under under-eating.

CRITERION FOR SUCCESS

High-Level Goals:

The RFID system can successfully identify different cats and determine what to feed them based on pre-recorded data (good measure would be 2 or 3 cats.)
The timer works according to the instruction based on each cat.

The dispenser is able to dispense food.

The dispenser can mix the right food for each cat.

The PCB works correctly.

All systems are able to be integrated together.

VoxBox Robo-Drummer

Craig Bost, Nicholas Dulin, Drake Proffitt

VoxBox Robo-Drummer

Featured Project

Our group proposes to create robot drummer which would respond to human voice "beatboxing" input, via conventional dynamic microphone, and translate the input into the corresponding drum hit performance. For example, if the human user issues a bass-kick voice sound, the robot will recognize it and strike the bass drum; and likewise for the hi-hat/snare and clap. Our design will minimally cover 3 different drum hit types (bass hit, snare hit, clap hit), and respond with minimal latency.

This would involve amplifying the analog signal (as dynamic mics drive fairly low gain signals), which would be sampled by a dsPIC33F DSP/MCU (or comparable chipset), and processed for trigger event recognition. This entails applying Short-Time Fourier Transform analysis to provide spectral content data to our event detection algorithm (i.e. recognizing the "control" signal from the human user). The MCU functionality of the dsPIC33F would be used for relaying the trigger commands to the actuator circuits controlling the robot.

The robot in question would be small; about the size of ventriloquist dummy. The "drum set" would be scaled accordingly (think pots and pans, like a child would play with). Actuators would likely be based on solenoids, as opposed to motors.

Beyond these minimal capabilities, we would add analog prefiltering of the input audio signal, and amplification of the drum hits, as bonus features if the development and implementation process goes better than expected.

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