ELEC 320, Fall 2006
Profs. Wismer & Kozick

Laboratory 7: Design Project


The next several weeks in lab will be primarily devoted to the design and development of a project related to signals and systems. You are free to choose the topic for your project. Some suggested topics are listed on this page, and some web links are provided. You will have the opportunity to give an oral presentation/demonstration of your project on December 4 (both lab sections will meet on this day), and you will submit a written report.

For October 25 and 30: Please list some potential project ideas, and identify your lab partners for the project. Also, please finish items from Lab 6, if necessary. Be sure you can use the FFT on the oscilloscope, and that you know how to use the Keithley A/D, D/A card from Matlab.

For November 1 and 6: Please submit an abstract that describes your lab design project. Include the title, the names of the participants, and a brief description of what you plan to do. You may refine your plans as you work over the coming weeks, but do your best to write an abstract based on your current understanding of your project. You should begin writing the abstract during the lab sessions on October 25 and 30.

Design Project Overview

You can work on the project individually, or in groups of two or three students. You must work with students in the same lab session. Projects from larger groups should be more ambitious. Be creative, and choose something that interests you!

Your project can be a purely analog system, a digital signal processing system, or a combination of analog and digital. The A/D and D/A cards are available to facilitate data acquisition and real-time implementation of your project. You can sample data with the A/D card and process it in Matlab, for example.

It is also possible for your project to be more of a research paper than an implementation. However, if you choose this type of topic, I would like you to try to implement (or simulate in Matlab) some aspect of the topic.

Digital filtering is one application of digital signal processing. A digital filter has a similar objective as an analog filter, namely to accentuate certain frequencies while attenuating other frequencies. The digital filter is actually a computer program that processes the sampled data. The Keithley cards will allow you to do real-time digital filtering, but at a limited sample rate.

Some Project Ideas

Some suggestions for projects are listed below. Selected projects from 1994 and 1995 are summarized in the paper at
http://www.eg.bucknell.edu/~kozick/ili/ili.pdf or, in HTML format,
http://www.eg.bucknell.edu/~kozick/ili/ili.html
Some projects from 1998 are listed at
http://www.eg.bucknell.edu/~kozick/elec32098/proj_sched.html
and projects from 2004 are listed at http://www.eg.bucknell.edu/~kozick/elec32004/proj_sched.html
You are free (and encouraged!) to pursue a project that are in-line with your interests! Professors Wismer and Kozick will be happy to discuss project ideas with you.