EIT Medical Imaging Device (Senior Design Project)

For my senior design project at UT, our team set out to construct a medical imaging device prototype using Electrical Impedance Tomography. Our aim was to design a prototype which could be made compact, portable, and simple for a non-technical end user (such as a doctor) to operate. The results had to be fast (at or near real time), accurate enough to be used for diagnosis, and simple for the user to interpret. This last requirement is crucial for emerging medical technology, as often medical imaging results require years of instruction and experience to reliably be used for diagnosis.

Monitor-Circuit Interface

For a project, I needed a cheap, simple way to interface a circuit to my computer. The premise was a simple setup for a team-based control-point game. The idea was that code on a laptop computer would be used to keep track of king of the hill style 'control points', connecting to a display box which would illuminate different colors depending on which team currently controlled the point. Each point would have a laptop, and they would communicate with each other over the network to determine whether a team controlled all points and send out victory music if that occurred.

USB control would be ideal, but went against the 'keep it simple' idea behind the original circuit. Searching online for alternate control ideas turned up no useful information - most laptops do not have serial ports, and this would tend to use a micro controller anyway. The novel solution I came up with was to use photo-transistors to interface a simple circuit with a segment of the monitor on which the code would display a series of black and white boxes, with each box representing one bit of data. The circuitry would use this data to control different colored LEDs in the display box, thus indicating which team was currently in control of the area. Because of the simple nature of this setup, a box for each laptop could be made quickly and at little out of pocket cost.

Simon Says - Tilt! (Embedded Systems Final Project)

For this project, my partner and I implemented a modification on the game ‘Simon Says’, in which the system outputs a sequence of lights and sounds that the user must duplicate. In our version, this is accomplished by tilting the system in the correct sequence of directions and sampling an accelerometer once the capture button is pressed. Inputs include a switch for reset, a switch for tilt capture, and an accelerometer to detect tilt. Output consists of four LEDs and a speaker.

The microprocessor used for this application was the Freescale MC68HC11; it was chosen for the code similarity to the chip used in class (Motorola 9S12DP512), its wide range of features for its price point, and PLCC packaging which made PCB layout easier than smaller or more densely packed designs. The accelerometer used was the Analog Devices ADXL202 Dual-Axis Accelerometer. A 9V battery was used to make the game portable, but included the option of using a wall wort as well.


Shown below are the PCB layouts we designed for this project: