EECS 373 Fall 2012 Sponsored Project Opportunities
Prabal Dutta

Background: There are lots of interesting embedded systems out there
that researchers could use but either don't have the skills or time to
actually design.  However, some of you may have the time and skills,
especially after 373, to create such things.  We'd like to encourage
that by identifying some project opportunities.  Most of these may not
seem as cool as building a small Segwey or a quadcopter.  On the other
hand, they are quite useful for addressing a range of research
problems.  Picking one of these projects will ensure that you will get
a lot of attention from the 373 instructional staff as well as a
nearly limitless budget (at least by 373 standards) to carry out your
ideas.  All of these projects can easily lead to publications in top
tier research conferences, so if you're interested in graduate school,
this would be an excellent way to get some visibility.


1. Smart badge.  Design and implement smart badges that can be worn by
   people and collect human inter-contact data.  A functioning system
   will capture any interactions that last longer than a few seconds
   between two closely-located (roughly 0-2 meters separation) people,
   including the distance separating them, using ultrasonic time of
   flight ranging.  The system should be small (less than 2" x 2"), be
   able to run off a coin cell battery (250 mA-hr) for at least a few
   days, and cost no more than $25 in modest volume.  It should
   include at least a few MB of NOR flash memory.  A successful
   project could lead to a large-scale (1000-2000 node) deployment.
   The following paper provides some background on what we're trying
   to do but the goal is a smaller, less expensive, and more useful
   badge: http://sing.stanford.edu/pubs/hotemnets10-flu.pdf


2. Energy-Harvesting Energy Meter.  Design a cubic-inch AC power meter
   that utilizes an energy-harvesting front-end.  The basic ideas is
   to: (i) take an extension cord; (ii) split the cord's conductors;
   (iii) wrap a coil around one of the conductors, thereby making a
   makeshift transformer; (iv) rectify the output of the coil; (v) use
   a harvester chip: (e.g https://www.sparkfun.com/products/9946) to
   convert this to useful energy; (vi) use the energy burst to
   increment a couneter and transmit a radio packet with the counter.
   On the receiver end, average power is proportional to count/time,
   where time is elapsed time between successive counts.  The
   hypothesis is that we can use this to measure energy consumption
   with more complex and costly electronics.

3. HiJack++.  Port the HiJack system (currently running on a TI MSP430
   processor and iPhone handset) to use the EnergyMicro TinyGecko ARM
   Cortex family, and have it conform to the hijack-infinity
   framework.  Create a novel sensor board (e.g. radiation sensor).
   Useful links:
   http://www.eecs.umich.edu/~prabal/projects/hijack
   https://github.com/ab500/hijack-infinity

4. EyeSight: Sighting you eyes with computational glasses.  Knowing
   what one is looking at has tremendous values in retail, real
   estate, advertising, product design, and other areas.  In this
   project, you will attach two cameras to a pair of glasses, one
   facing outward (world-facing) and one facing inward (eye-facing).
   The goal will be to synchronize the image feeds from these two
   cameras, extract the location of the pupil, and mark where on the
   world-facing image a person is looking.  There will need to be some
   training to correlate the images from the two cameras.  This will
   require some familiarly with image processing tools (e.g. OpenCV)
   and low-power imagers.