Background

ECE 3400 expands upon the topics covered in ECE 2000-level courses, including circuits, digital logic, computer organization, and signals. The class centers around the programming of a small robot and culminates in a demo in which the robot will use ultrasonic sensors to navigate a maze, sense the frequency of blinking "treasures" using phototransistors, and send this information back to the base station using RF communications. My lab partner for this class is Elias Hanna (eph48).

Use the buttons at the top of this page to navigate to the full documentation for each lab. View the code for this page on GitHub here.

Lab 1 Summary

For lab 1, we first hard-coded a path for the robot to find the best servo speeds for basic motions like moving forward/backwards and turning left/right at different angles. We then added ultrasonic sensors and used them to avoid walls while moving through a short maze.

Lab 2 Summary

In lab 2, we worked on the "treasure detection" aspect of our robot by giving it the ability to detect the frequency at which a light was blinking. We also wired and coded a seven-segment display to show numbers up to 10,000 for future use in displaying the detected frequencies.

Lab 3 Summary

In lab 3, we built a basic microphone circuit, an amplifier circuit, and a high pass filter in order to reliably detect the frequency of tones played near the mic, which we'll need to start our final demo in response to a tone. We also simulated a high-pass and low-pass filter in LTSpice and conducted fast Fourier transforms (FFTs) both in Matlab and on the Arduino itself to isolate the most prominent frequencies.

Lab 4 Summary

In lab 4, we first set up RF communication between our robot and base station, then compiled the work we had done in previous labs and added more robust navigation in order to prepare for the Final Demo. During the Final Demo, we were expected to have the robot listen for a tone indicating it could start, autonomously navigate a maze we had not seen before, detect two treasures placed at random locations throughout the maze, and send the frequencies at which the treasure LEDs were blinking back to the base station using RF communication.