RemoteCom

RemoteCom: TCP application responsible for wireless connection & transmission.

RPI's engineerinproject classes often require creativity & ingenuity to complete The Introduction to Engineering Design class, required such, and working in a team of 30+ people.

Each semester, the students are given a goal to accomplish, and it could be anything from home safety, to security detection, to toys. The spring semester of 2002, the project was frisbee launcher that hits targets from 15, 30, and 45 ft away. All of the engineers were divided into subteams according to their majors, and needed project parts. The 4 subteams consisted of: Loader, Machine Control, Base, and Launcher.

My role was unique, as I was to do my own project: an entire scoring system using 6 shock sensors. The targets at 15, 30, and 45 ft also had bullseyes, and it was important to discriminate as to when the frisbee hit the bullseye or edge. The tools we had available were, breadboards, nand, and, xor, nor gates, and labview software & adapter.. We had allocated budget of about $100, from the engineering school funds. This ofcourse wasn't enough, but was sufficient to get us started.

I bought 6 shock detectors that required 9-12 volts, and outputs low each time it is triggered. The 3 targets had the same scoring, 3 pts for bullseye, and 1 for regular hit. It made no sense to do 6 channels. So I used NAND gates to cut it down to 2: the bullseye, or regular hit. NAND gate chips had additional problem of using 5v. power supply, the 9 v signals would've burned it out. I had to use voltage converters for that. As such, the voltage converters were nothing more than mini transformers, both the converters and the chips ran hot due to excessive current going through. Using a 9 volt battery made perfect sense, and placing v.transformer in the positive terminal, proved to be clever way to power the NAND gate chips(Ofcourse, the battery died in less than 30 min of use).

Having the hardware hooked up was the easy part. The harder part was to turn it into something more than signals being sent to PCMCIA adapter. I've used, labview(for initial signal detection) in conjunction of VB(for scorekeeping & network connectivity) and adhoc wireless to set up a complete fully funtional scoring system.

Final test turned out interesting. The launcher was, literally, a war machine, bending frisbees, from enourmous impulse force. The targets were hit with such intensity that seldom, the bullseye sensor was triggered due to excessive velocity that the frisbees hit the targets with. Our team won 3rd place, and could have won 1st easily, if the linear launcher didn't break.