Advanced electronic technology and the design and development of an integral circuit, multi-channel telemetry system for bio-medical applications Final report, Mar. 1966 - Feb. 1969

Application of electronic technology to design and development of integrated circuit, telemetry system for biomedicin

NRF52-piirisarjaan perustuva elektroninen ohjausjärjestelmän kehitysalusta

Aim of the thesis was to develop and build an embedded hardware device that utilizes a SoC from the Nordic Semiconductor nRF52-series. The purpose was to create a modular platform that would be capable of controlling later developed control system applications. The selected example application was a heating control system for a small scale wood chip burning water boiler. The nRF52-series devices are SoC’s with integrated 2.4 GHz radio modules, which are intended for implementing low bandwidth wireless networks such as BLE or ANT+. The devices have a ARM Cortex-M4 processors integrated to a set of peripheral devices. The processors are capable of running both application code and wireless networks stacks in the same device, which makes them fully integrated wireless SoC solutions. In the platform the radio is planned to be used for extending the user interface as well as connecting additional devices such as sensors. However, the content of the thesis is solely focused on developing and implementing hardware part of the design. The hardware developed in the thesis is a modular three board design. Consisting of one main board with the SoC and two auxiliary boards with connection interfaces to the application. The boards are supplied from mains network and can control three mains powered devices with duplicated switches for safety. When mains network is not available, the device operates from a integrated li-ion battery which keeps non-mains related features working from several hours to multiple days. Other main features include a BLE radio, USB serial interface, battery charger and a configurable interface for thermocouples and resistive temperature sensors. Additionally the device has a user interface consisting of a LED-array, two digit 7-segment display, buzzer, buttons and a motorized potentiometer. Design decisions, implementation and some operational theory are covered in the theoretical part of the thesis. In the practical part of the thesis, all features of the three boards were designed as well as a schematic and layout of the boards were drawn. Component sourcing, board assembly and reflow soldering were also done within the thesis. All boards were designed to fit in a off-the-self enclosure with custom designed and manufactured front panel serving as the user interface. The work done during the thesis covers a full electronic hardware device development process and resulted in an actual devices that can be used to control applications such as the boiler heating system

Positioning systems using families of binary sequences with low correlation

RESUMEN: El objetivo de este trabajo es el estudio de la aplicación de familias de secuencias binarias de baja correlación para su uso en sistemas de posicionamiento en tiempo real en interiores como por ejemplo en entornos industriales o de almacenamiento. Actualmente es un problemas abierto para el que se han propuesto distintas tecnologías como sistemas basados en visión artificial o en redes de sensores entre otros. En este proyecto se ha implementado un sistema de posicionamiento en interiores de bajos recursos por medio de secuencias binarias de baja correlación. La investigación se ha centrado en la revisión de las tecnologías existentes en el mercado, la búsqueda de las secuencias binarias más apropiadas y el estudio de sus propiedades. Siguiendo el modelo GPS como sistema de localización en exteriores, se ha construido un propotipo basado en placas Arduino. Nuestra propuesta codifica la información mediante secuencias Pseudo Noise, códigos Gold y Kasami. Posteriormente estas secuencias son transmitidas utilizando señales de ultrasonido. En el receptor, las señales recibidas se pueden procesar para obtener medidas como la distancia entre dispositivos y el ángulo de llegada entre otras.ABSTRACT: The aim of this project is the study of families of binary sequences of low correlation and its application to real-time indoor positioning systems in industrial or warehousing environments. Many different approaches based on different technologies such as artificial vision or sensor networks have been proposed for indoor localization but it still remains an open problem. In this work, we have implemented a low resources indoor positioning system over over a embedded system, that uses binary sequences of low correlation. The research has focused on existent technologies in the market, on the search of the most appropriate family of sequences and the study of their properties. Taking GPS as a reference model for outdoor localization, we have built a prototype based on Arduino boards. Our approach encodes messages with Pseudo Noise sequences, Gold and Kasami Codes. Afterwards, the sequences are transmitted as ultrasonic signals. Then, the receiver processes the incoming signal to obtain measures such as the distances between devices and the angle of arrival of the signal.Máster en Matemáticas y Computació

Single-photon detection techniques for underwater imaging

This Thesis investigates the potential of a single-photon depth profiling system for imaging in highly scattering underwater environments. This scanning system measured depth using the time-of-flight and the time-correlated single-photon counting (TCSPC) technique. The system comprised a pulsed laser source, a monostatic scanning transceiver, with a silicon single-photon avalanche diode (SPAD) used for detection of the returned optical signal. Spectral transmittance measurements were performed on a number of different water samples in order to characterize the water types used in the experiments. This identified an optimum operational wavelength for each environment selected, which was in the wavelength region of 525 - 690 nm. Then, depth profiles measurements were performed in different scattering conditions, demonstrating high-resolution image re-construction for targets placed at stand-off distances up to nine attenuation lengths, using average optical power in the sub-milliwatt range. Depth and spatial resolution were investigated in several environments, demonstrating a depth resolution in the range of 500 μm to a few millimetres depending on the attenuation level of the medium. The angular resolution of the system was approximately 60 μrad in water with different levels of attenuation, illustrating that the narrow field of view helped preserve spatial resolution in the presence of high levels of forward scattering. Bespoke algorithms were developed for image reconstruction in order to recover depth, intensity and reflectivity information, and to investigate shorter acquisition times, illustrating the practicality of the approach for rapid frame rates. In addition, advanced signal processing approaches were used to investigate the potential of multispectral single-photon depth imaging in target discrimination and recognition, in free-space and underwater environments. Finally, a LiDAR model was developed and validated using experimental data. The model was used to estimate the performance of the system under a variety of scattering conditions and system parameters

Acceleration Techniques for Sparse Recovery Based Plane-wave Decomposition of a Sound Field

Plane-wave decomposition by sparse recovery is a reliable and accurate technique for plane-wave decomposition which can be used for source localization, beamforming, etc. In this work, we introduce techniques to accelerate the plane-wave decomposition by sparse recovery. The method consists of two main algorithms which are spherical Fourier transformation (SFT) and sparse recovery. Comparing the two algorithms, the sparse recovery is the most computationally intensive. We implement the SFT on an FPGA and the sparse recovery on a multithreaded computing platform. Then the multithreaded computing platform could be fully utilized for the sparse recovery. On the other hand, implementing the SFT on an FPGA helps to flexibly integrate the microphones and improve the portability of the microphone array. For implementing the SFT on an FPGA, we develop a scalable FPGA design model that enables the quick design of the SFT architecture on FPGAs. The model considers the number of microphones, the number of SFT channels and the cost of the FPGA and provides the design of a resource optimized and cost-effective FPGA architecture as the output. Then we investigate the performance of the sparse recovery algorithm executed on various multithreaded computing platforms (i.e., chip-multiprocessor, multiprocessor, GPU, manycore). Finally, we investigate the influence of modifying the dictionary size on the computational performance and the accuracy of the sparse recovery algorithms. We introduce novel sparse-recovery techniques which use non-uniform dictionaries to improve the performance of the sparse recovery on a parallel architecture

Neurofly 2008 abstracts : the 12th European Drosophila neurobiology conference 6-10 September 2008 Wuerzburg, Germany

This volume consists of a collection of conference abstracts