Whiteknight
04-20-2005, 09:06 AM
My group and I have finally settled on a plan for our senior design capstone project. the project is called "wireless house" and goes as follows:
power to house-hold devices is controlled centrally through a "home computer", that will be a small, embedded i386 board. the i386 will output a multiplexed signal to a demux box and antenna, that will in turn send control signals wirelessly to remote receivers. the remote receivers then will use a series of relays and/or transistors to control 120v AC power sources.
on the other end of the central i386 will be a variety of human interface devices, including a simple LCD/Keypad, graphical interfaces for connected PCs (Win32, Linux, and Mac versions are all in the works), web-based cgi and email interfaces.
I've been designated the lead programmer of the project, which means I will be writing the port I/O routines(mostly in ASM), the data protocalls (in C mostly), and the various GUIs (also in C, possibly some Java for the portability, some PERL for the CGI work, etc).
it's going to be a big project, and I've certainly been given a large amount of work to complete. a big issue however is that engineers (even the "computer engineers" like myself) are generally lousy programmers, and projects in previous years that have depended on programming (even small amounts of it) have failed. my other group member, Curt and I are some of the best programmers in the entire Engineering college. We wanted to do something with alot of diverse programming.
what do people think about the project? think we can get it all done? I'll certainly keep people posted as things progress.
power to house-hold devices is controlled centrally through a "home computer", that will be a small, embedded i386 board. the i386 will output a multiplexed signal to a demux box and antenna, that will in turn send control signals wirelessly to remote receivers. the remote receivers then will use a series of relays and/or transistors to control 120v AC power sources.
on the other end of the central i386 will be a variety of human interface devices, including a simple LCD/Keypad, graphical interfaces for connected PCs (Win32, Linux, and Mac versions are all in the works), web-based cgi and email interfaces.
I've been designated the lead programmer of the project, which means I will be writing the port I/O routines(mostly in ASM), the data protocalls (in C mostly), and the various GUIs (also in C, possibly some Java for the portability, some PERL for the CGI work, etc).
it's going to be a big project, and I've certainly been given a large amount of work to complete. a big issue however is that engineers (even the "computer engineers" like myself) are generally lousy programmers, and projects in previous years that have depended on programming (even small amounts of it) have failed. my other group member, Curt and I are some of the best programmers in the entire Engineering college. We wanted to do something with alot of diverse programming.
what do people think about the project? think we can get it all done? I'll certainly keep people posted as things progress.