Wireless Water Flow Meter Network in the Great Bay

The Oyster Restoration Program alongside the New Hampshire chapter of the Nature Conservancy is working towards developing new oyster beds throughout the Great Bay. Sedimentation is proving to be a vast problem by covering up the beds before they have a chance to grow to a healthy level. The many rivers entering the Great Bay are bringing the sediments from all over the region and limiting the ability of the program to develop the new beds. They need a way to measure the sedimentation rate, by measuring the flow rate of the rivers over a single tidal cycle in various locations throughout the bay. This is done simply by the design of a wireless water flow meter network. Using a Price Meter as the measurement tool and an Arduino UNO to organize the data, the Oyster Restoration Program can monitor the characteristics of the locations to gain a better understanding of the location as a potential site for a new oyster bed. The design of an self contained system to extract and store the data to be collected is essential to speed up the process of monitoring these locations, which the device developed here will do

Frankenstein's Toolkit: Prototyping Electronics Using Consumer Products

In our practice as educators, researchers and designers we have found that centering reverse engineering and reuse has pedagogical, environmental, and economic benefits. Design decisions in the development of new hardware tool-kits should consider how we can use e-waste at hand as integral components of electronics prototyping. Dissection, extraction and modification can give insights into how things are made at scale. Simultaneously, it can enable prototypes that have greater fidelity or functionality than would otherwise be cost-effective to produce

Collaborative Collective Algorithms to Coordinate UGVs

Sentel/Brilliant Innovations has developed autonomous UGVs (unmanned ground vehicles) capable of generating a map of an unknown location through exploration using local software and the power of Google Tango technology. This project was tasked with developing an efficient and capable map-stitching solution allowing multiple UGVs to coordinate their movements and share information in order to greatly improve the speed at which these drones can be used to generate maps. The solution utilizes the processing power of a Raspberry Pi to pull maps from a Redis server and stitch them together. Once stitched, the maps are redistributed via the Redis server back through the network, providing every UGV the opportunity to obtain the global map. All of this stitching is performed on a single UGV, freeing the other drones to focus on generating and uploading their own unique maps to the server. The drones can use this new information to better inform their next move to prevent multiple drones from generating a map of the same location. In the future, Sentel/Brilliant Innovations hopes to take this technology and attach more advanced sensors to the drones, allowing them to add greater detail of the environment to the map rather than simply drawing boundaries. These drones have many potential applications, such as search and rescue, seeking out potential hazards, and intelligence for military and civil use.https://scholarscompass.vcu.edu/capstone/1187/thumbnail.jp

Block-Based Development of Mobile Learning Experiences for the Internet of Things

The Internet of Things enables experts of given domains to create smart user experiences for interacting with the environment. However, development of such experiences requires strong programming skills, which are challenging to develop for non-technical users. This paper presents several extensions to the block-based programming language used in App Inventor to make the creation of mobile apps for smart learning experiences less challenging. Such apps are used to process and graphically represent data streams from sensors by applying map-reduce operations. A workshop with students without previous experience with Internet of Things (IoT) and mobile app programming was conducted to evaluate the propositions. As a result, students were able to create small IoT apps that ingest, process and visually represent data in a simpler form as using App Inventor's standard features. Besides, an experimental study was carried out in a mobile app development course with academics of diverse disciplines. Results showed it was faster and easier for novice programmers to develop the proposed app using new stream processing blocks.Spanish National Research Agency (AEI) - ERDF fund

RepRapable automated open source bag valve mask-based ventilator

This study describes the development of an automated bag valve mask (BVM) compression system, which, during acute shortages and supply chain disruptions can serve as a temporary emergency ventilator. The resuscitation system is based on the Arduino controller with a real-time operating system installed on a largely RepRap 3-D printable parametric component-based structure. The cost of the system is under $170, which makes it affordable for replication by makers around the world. The device provides a controlled breathing mode with tidal volumes from 100 to 800 milliliters, breathing rates from 5 to 40 breaths/minute, and inspiratory-to-expiratory ratio from 1:1 to 1:4. The system is designed for reliability and scalability of measurement circuits through the use of the serial peripheral interface and has the ability to connect additional hardware due to the object-oriented algorithmic approach. Experimental results demonstrate repeatability and accuracy exceeding human capabilities in BVM-based manual ventilation. Future work is necessary to further develop and test the system to make it acceptable for deployment outside of emergencies in clinical environments, however, the nature of the design is such that desired features are relatively easy to add with the test using protocols and parametric design files provided

One Way of Bringing Final Year Computer Science Student World to the World of Children with Cerebral Palsy: A Case Study

In this paper, a learning project is explained which is being carried out at the school of computer science at the University of Seville. The aim is that students receive knowledge of assistive technologies when in fact there is no this discipline in our curricula. So the best way, it is programming final studies projects in this field. We want to make the projects have a real application and can solve difficulties that children with Cerebral Palsy have in their daily activities in the school.Junta de Andalucía p08-TIC-363

Wallarm

The nature of our project is essentially an upgraded alarm clock that ensures that the user will wake up at the time set. Figure 1 displays the hardware of the project and has colored circles to indicate different components. The alarm functions by initially sounding a loud buzzer (red) at the set alarm time. If the user decides to snooze the alarm by pressing the snooze button (purple), the alarm will wait for a given amount of time before setting off the buzzer again. It will then trigger a Servo motor (pink) that will flip a traditional toggle switch to turn the light on and then return to sounding the buzzer until the user turns off the alarm by pressing the off button (orange). This off button may be used at any time throughout the alarm. The time is displayed on a liquid crystal display screen. The brightness of the screen is adjusted automatically using a photoresistor (yellow). The photoresistor allows the screen to be brighter in a well-lit area and dims the screen in darker settings in order to conserve power. The user can use the numeric keypad to manually input the time in military time. The purpose of using military time is to avoid the complexities of differentiating between AM and PM. To set the alarm time, a switch (blue) is used to change to “set alarm” mode where the user can use the same numeric pad and instruction set to set the alarm

ARDUINO BASED WIRELESS MOBOT

Increased connectivity and remote monitoring and control mechanisms have revolutionized the field of measurement and automation. The proposed work is to design a system which will integrate a mobile bot with Arduino, and it is also possible with LabVIEW through a gateway to run wirelessly. An autonomous robot vehicle is to travel from source to destination through the wheels which are controlled by processor. This will be helpful launch in the application where human being travel will be difficult to meet the work. The proposed system will be able to follow a path with obstacle avoiding.Further, the vehicle can be integrated with NI instruments and with LabVIEW to make it autonomous. LabVIEW is a graphical programming language gives a platform for the engineers, which is effective and scalable to focus on robotics neglecting the minute implementation details.Â

Design-thinking, making, and innovating: Fresh tools for the physician\u27s toolbox

Medical school education should foster creativity by enabling students to become \u27makers\u27 who prototype and design. Healthcare professionals and students experience pain points on a daily basis, but are not given the tools, training, or opportunity to help solve them in new, potentially better ways. The student physician of the future will learn these skills through collaborative workshops and having dedicated \u27innovation time.\u27 This pre-clinical curriculum would incorporate skills centered on (1) Digital Technology and Small Electronics (DTSE), (2) Textiles and Medical Materials (TMM), and (3) Rapid Prototyping Technologies (RPT). Complemented by an on-campus makerspace, students will be able to prototype and iterate on their ideas in a fun and accessible space. Designing and making among and between patients and healthcare professionals would change the current dynamic of medical education, empowering students to solve problems in healthcare even at an early stage in their career. By doing so, they will gain empathy, problem-solving abilities, and communication skills that will extend into clinical practice. Our proposed curriculum will equip medical students with the skills, passion, and curiosity to impact the future of healthcare