Team, individual award winners chosen for Spring 2019 senior design
Each semester, the staff for ECE 49022: EE Senior Design Projects selects a team and an individual that stand out among the rest. For Spring 2019, the Barrett Robinson Team Award winner was Project Omega. The team members were Alex Medoff, Alex Warner, Connor Knack, and Sam Jackson. The project title was “Custom Electric Scooter Dashboard.”
Project Omega designed and prototyped custom dashboard for a commercial electric scooter. The existing display on the scooter only indicated the current speed. The primary objective of Project Omega was to provide more information about the operating state of the scooter while also adding extra safety features, security features, and customization options.
The project required the team to:
- Fully reverse engineer the custom protocol used by the scooter. There was no documentation of the protocols the existing control system used, so the team decoded and reimplemented the control system.
- Design a board to interface with the throttle, brake, and new UI system. This board also needed to operate off of the power provided by the scooter.
- Design and build a new speed sensor for the rear wheel in order to perform slip detection.
- Develop all of the control schemes to interface the new display unit with the speed controller.
- Develop a system for locking the scooter and detecting when it is being used without being unlocked.
The staff for ECE 49022 indicated Project Omega’s high quality work, excellent documentation, and attention to detail as some of the reasons the team was chosen to receive the Barrett Robinson Team Award.
Thomas Hickey was selected as the Spring 2019 Eaton Award winner, which recognizes the top individual in ECE 49022. Hickey and his team, Team Chess, set out to build a smart chess board that could teach someone how to play chess and increase in difficulty as the player improves.
“We had a piece detection system in the chess board so whenever you would lift up a piece it would recognize it and then light up the spaces where that piece could be moved,” says Hickey. “The neural network gives you an output of your chances of winning the game based on each move. This would give players an idea of which moves were good moves.”
Hickey was primarily responsible for designing the chess AI. He developed a method to train the AI using a Monte Carlo tree search. His trained AI was interfaced with the chess board in order to determine what moves to make and was successfully trained to play at 3 different ELO levels for beginner, intermediate, and advanced players. Hickey also stepped in to help the rest of his team with the hardware design.
“Chess has been something I’ve loved my whole life,” says Hickey. “Part of the reason I did this project is because I love AI and machine learning, and getting to apply it to something I enjoy as a personal hobby was awesome.”
The staff for ECE 49022 noted Hickey’s deep understanding of the systems needed for training a neural network, his ingenuity, and going above and beyond what was asked of him as just a few of the reasons Hickey was chosen for the Eaton award. He says he was surprised by the honor.
“I wasn’t expecting it at all, to be honest,” he says. “It makes me feel accomplished about the work that I’ve done. I’m grateful for all that Purdue ECE has done for me and for all of the help and opportunities it has given me.”
Hickey says he enjoyed the freedom of the senior design process.
“It really puts you in a position where you really have to figure things out on your own for the first time, which I think is a really good thing to have right before you’re going into a job,” he says. “It also gives you a good opportunity to get comfortable working with teammates in an atmosphere that isn’t as closely supervised as other undergraduate classes are.”