Senior Design (Capstone) Ideas?

[robertneville777]

The almighty cheb2ords! I humbly beseech thee again, seeking thy guidance as I maketh pilgrimage to the final altar of enlightenment!

Joking aside, I need help coming up with some ideas for a "senior design" project (BSEE). So far, I've come up with ideas that are too easy, too over the top, not practical, or just not really good. I was wondering if you some of you guys with industry experience could give me some general guidance, useful tips, or any advice as I look and brainstorm for potential project ideas.

To give an idea of the breadth or complexity of the project, I have about 15 weeks to plan and develop it, and another 15 weeks to implement it. According to my teacher, this

http://nrgalassi.org/EECE-490A/Spring%202015%20Projects/Daniel%20Finn_pds%20-%20final.pdf

is a good example of a project in terms of scope and depth.

I'm really into DSP and designing digital filters as far as the math goes. In our DSP class, we designed the filters and changed the parameters in our teacher's assembly code on an old TI DSProcessor. So I won't lie and say I have experience actually making one. But I do have FPGA experience, and from what I've read online, it shouldn't be that hard to implement the filter on an FPGA once the filter is designed?

So I guess my question is where could you see a digital filter being applied in a senior project idea?

I know the big ones are going to be audio-related projects since that only involves one axis (time) versus image-processing which will at least consists of x and y domains. I'm guessing that's going to be harder and a lot more involved? Perhaps over my head?

Again, just brainstorming ideas before I start the class. If you have any ideas, throw them out there, as long as they're reasonable. It doesn't even have to be DSP, that's just one of the things in EE I'm really interested in.

I'm not looking for exact details; I know that's my responsibility, but any rough ideas, or websites that could have resources or point me in the general direction would be great.

Thanks, and let me know if you guys need any more info.

[German_EE]

OK, since you are a DSP Guru here is an idea:

http://www.elecraft.com/PX3/px3_large.jpg

The display on the left is called a panadapter, it works like a narrow-band spectrum analyzer and displays all of the RF signals either side of the frequency the radio is tuned to. The problem is that this unit ONLY works with this particular transceiver. Your task is to design a universal panadapter, when connected to any receiver I.F. it should:

1) Scan for the center of the receiver first I.F. and then align itself to this frequency. Center frequencies can range from 4,9 MHz to 75 MHz

2) Display all signals either side of the center frequency on a variable width display from +/- 10 KHz to +/- 100 KHz, width to be alterable using a front panel control.

[NiHaoMike]

What about HD low latency wireless audio? It would make use of a transmitter connected to a PC or other device via S/PDIF or HDMI (use an off the shelf HDMI audio extractor for that), send the audio in digital format over the 900MHz band, and then a portable receiver converts it to analog for playback via headphones.

[hendorog]

A couple of random ideas which I think would be cool

Adaptive audio filter for noise reduction.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_filter

Super resolution algorithm in a DSP which opportunistically enhance 'live' standard definition FPV video.
e.g. something like this
http://www.infognition.com/VideoEnhancer/

[robertneville777]

Adaptive audio filter for noise reduction.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_filter

Thanks for the idea Hendorog! The "adaptive" audio filter actually was one of the "crazy" ideas I was thinking about, since I didn't see many examples or references to it online. I actually wanted to do it digitally, but wasn't sure how to go about it. So instead I was thinking about implementing the adaptive filter via a biquad circuit, since you can adjust the bandpass qualities with just resistors. But with that link you posted, I might try to do it digitally now!

If you have anymore info on the adaptive filter, please let me know! I'm going to try and look up more info on these babies!

[marshallh]

FIR filters in FPGA are pretty trivial if your sample rate is much slower than the max clock rate of the FPGA. It gets more interesting once you need to have a sample every cycle.
The difficult part is in designing the filter coefficients which can be done with any number of tools.

[Marco]

How about a beam forming microphone array which uses a person's head direction to determine how to filter the sound?

[free_electron]

led with a series resistor..

[hendorog]

If you have anymore info on the adaptive filter, please let me know! I'm going to try and look up more info on these babies!

I don't have any first hand knowledge unfortunately, you have probably already found this paper with matlab code:
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~aarti/pubs/ANC.pdf

Thanks for the idea Hendorog!

You are most welcome, let us know what you decide to do, and good luck !