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Every year, MSOE holds a Senior Design show, where many seniors proudly showcase the projects they’ve built and developed within the past year. Senior Design is a requirement for MSOE students and involves working with a team of other seniors to design and develop fairly complex projects. The projects vary according to the majors of each student. MSOE’s degree programs consist of Architectural Engineering (AE), Biomedical Engineering (BE), Computer Engineering (CE), Electrical Engineering (EE), Industrial Engineering (IE), Mechanical Engineering (ME), Software Engineering (SE), Management Information Systems (MIS), Construction Management (CM), Technical Communication (TC), Business, and Nursing. Bright young minds with diverse academic backgrounds come together in Senior Design to show just what these fresh young thinkers can do.

Senior design teams work very hard during the school year to complete their projects. Design teams must submit a project proposal and wait to be accepted, after which the teams begin scheduling deadlines for each phase in the project. These projects involve a heavy amount of paperwork, which requires a log of each team member’s times spent working on the project, cycle reports giving feedback to team advisors about the progress of the project, and documentation explaining the details of the project.

I attended the Senior Design show at the end of May, but being an SE myself, I spent most of my time exploring the CE/SE design projects. A listing of the 2005-2006 CE/SE Senior Design teams and a brochure of the Senior Design show (not just CEs and SEs) are located on MSOE’s website. I’ll highlight a few of the projects that I thought were pretty cool. I should have brought my camera to take pictures, but I forgot to bring it with me. I’ll be sure to take pictures next year.

Game Control/Team JUMP (Wireless Gamepad)

Jason Bottoni (CE/EE), Carl Brienen (CE), Steven Ennesser (EE), and Joshua Schneider (CE) were known as Team JUMP, and this senior design team created a wireless gamepad. Specifically, Team JUMP created a dance pad designed for playing DDR on the Playstation 2. The dance pad was hooked up to the PS2 during the design show and was available for people to demo. Various commercial DDR gamepads were also available so that people could compare the wireless pad with the store-bought versions.

The wireless pad needed to be plugged into an outlet to provide power, making the pad not completely wireless, but the pad did communicate with the PS2 wirelessly, via a black box connected to the PS2. Sensors inside each button on the dance pad are pressure-sensitive and trigger communication between the dance pad and the PS2 once a button is pressed. Compared with the thin, soft commercial DDR pads, Team JUMP’s wireless game pad provided better sensitivity with each button, so you didn’t have to step on the button as hard. Team JUMP’s pad was also much sturdier and wouldn’t move around while you were dancing on it.

I played a few rounds of DDR with each pad, testing the wireless pad and comparing it with its commercial counterparts. The pad worked quite well and certainly matched up to the $300-$400 metal DDR dance pads currently on the market. On a side note, I lost every game I played, but I’m no DDR master, so that was expected.

The team had originally designed the gamepad to work across all major gaming platforms, but due to time constraints, Team JUMP was not able to implement that feature. Getting the pad to work with the PS2 proved to be quite difficult, as the team had to reverse engineer the controls in order to figure out how to make the gamepad communicate with the PS2.

Car Alarm to Cell

How the Car-to-Cell system works.

Ryan Fields (EE), Alex Goberman (CE/EE), Matthew Olcikas (CE/EE), and Vadik Vargas (CE) interfaced a cellphone with a car. A cellphone could be used to check the conditions of the car, and the car can even alert the owner (via cellphone) that the car is currently being stolen. Even more amazing, the owner can use his cellphone to control his car from a remote location!

During the demonstration, the design team showed how to start the car’s engine with just the press of a button on the cellphone. The cellphone could interact with the car’s engine, alarm system, windows, and door locks. (The car-to-cell system may have had more features, but those were the only ones that I was aware of.) The car-to-cell system works by communicating between the owner’s cellphone and a cellphone placed in the car. Interactions between the car’s cellphone and the car are done via Bluetooth technology.

The software program on the cellphones were designed using a limited version of the Java programming language, Java Microedition (J2ME).

Stored Tagging File Utility (STFU)

Jonathan Davis (SE), Andrew Kant (SE), David Rehfeldt (SE), and Corey Sullivan (SE) created a desktop application that allows users to tag files with keywords. Searching for files in Windows can be a tedious task, and depending on what you’re looking for, Windows might not be able to find it. Having a feature such as tagging files would make files easier to find and categorize. Users can add special notes reminding them to do something with the file later or that a file has a special meaning. Similar technologies are used in several web applications, including Flickr (which allows you to tag photos) and Del.icio.us (which lets you bookmark favorite sites and tag them with different categories).

Smart House

William Burns (CE), Evan Edwards (CE), Stephen Leow (CE), and Joshua Rubright (CE) came together to create the Smart House Network, which allows users to remotely access devices at their house, which could be a lamp, a fan, a door—anything configured for the Smart House Network.

The demo shown at the senior design show consisted of a “house,” which was really a wall with an outlet that powered a few common household devices. A web browser showed the controls of a fan, and with the click of a button, the speed of the fan could be changed. A cellphone could also be used, and the cellphone during the demonstration was used to turn on/off the lamp connected to the outlet.

… and many more

There were several other senior design projects at the show, such as Line-Splosion, a 3D arcade game that plays much like Tron, and Project Snowstorm, a virtual environment simulation. Projects outside the CE/SE realm included basic utility vehicles created by MEs, a lithium-ion powered motorcycle created by a group of EEs, and a medication delivery unit designed by BE students.

This year’s design show was certainly entertaining, and I look forward to seeing next year’s.