Engineering Projects

Below are two projects I developed during my studies as an Electrical Engineering student

Model of the Forearm of prosthetic arm - by teammates Keagan Gambler

Electrode Amplifier PCB

Amplifier in action

Robotic hand being actuated by electrode/microcontroller setup

Myoelectric Prosthetic Arm (Capstone 2020-2021)

Senior Design Project

Before the Summer 2020 semester, word got around in Kinsley Engineering Center (of YCP) that there were slots available for new Capstone projects. Since most of the already existing projects did not particularly catch my attention, I decided to propose my own idea: a myoelectric prosthetic arm.

With a block diagram and a proposal paper, it was accepted. Since, I have been working on designing a PCB with an electrode amplifier (to detect electrical signals coming from muscles), a microcontroller, and servo drivers with current sensors.

With the project finalized, I have gained insight into the design of precision amplifiers, line and ambient noise suppression, SMD component usage, PCB layout, PCB design towards manufacturing current sensing circuits, and much more.

Below and to the left, you can see an output of the electrode amplifier PCB. The Analog Discovery II digital oscilloscope allows you to play an input signal as sound, so you can "hear" what your muscle signals sound like. I found this to be quite interesting, since from a frequency standpoint, the signal appears to be random noise. Of course, this is simply from a 2-electrode setup. We considered adding more electrodes and conducting frequency analysis to determine when individual digits (that is, fingers) were being contracted, but we could not perform these tests due to time constraints.

Finally, the last video is a demonstration of a robotic hand being actuated with the electrode amplifier. The microcontroller used was an MSP430, programmed in C.

Electrical Engineering Design (ECE300) 2019

Class project

For this course, groups of 4 students were prompted to design a device that prevents forest fires. Word for word, that was all we were given. This meant that this was a very open ended engineering problem that, as a group, we needed to solve.

Two weeks of research, later, we designed a set of constraints we wanted our device to meet. Briefly, they were:

Detect a small fire at a radius of a minimum of 1 m.
Transmit alarms to a central device.
Have independent power from a renewable energy source

To the left, a the internal wiring of the device. While a bit crude and using perforated circuit board, all electronics fit inside, and worked as designed.

Four infrared sensors and one temperature sensor were connected to an Arduino Micro board. The selected RF transmission protocol was ZigBee, utilizing an XBee module from Digi.

SolidWorks model of Joystick Panel - All parts modeled from scratch

First prototype built

First prototype built - Painted and wired

Arcade Machine

Personal project

I love videogames as much as the next guy. I especially love the feel of classic Arcade Machines. As a side project, I wanted to make a bar-top Arcade Cabinet for myself, and to share with my father, who first introduced me to the classic games from his childhood.

I first started by modeling and building a Joystick Panel. I modeled all buttons and joysticks from scratch, based on a kit I bought online.

This project introduced me to the Laser Cutter that was recently acquired in York College. Now knowing how to operate it, I believe I have a great new tool for rapid prototyping!

The next steps include configuring a Raspberry Pi for game emulation, and finally bringing it all together to a comprehensive assembly, with an Arcade case, VGA screen and Joystick Panel.