Senior Design

For my Senior Design project, I am working with a team of four other guys to make this a reality. It is a SWAT reconnaissance vehicle for the Salem (Oregon) Police Department. It will have the ability to climb stairs and other obstacles. The camera with pan-and-tilt will give a 360-degree view of the environment and transmit audio and video back to the control unit. It will operate on LiPo battery packs, utilizing buck-boost and buck voltage regulators. The camera will automatically switch to night mode in low light, using infrared LEDs for lighting. Battery meters will be utilized for the drive as well as auxiliary battery packs. These will be designed with green, yellow, and red LED assemblies. The motor controller will be powered with a 22.2V pack, while the auxiliary systems as well as control unit will use 11.1V packs. The vehicle will operate a minimum of one hour, with at least 20% drive-time. As we speak, the chassis is being fabricated. On the electrical side, we need to design printed circuit boards (PCBs) for the voltage regulators and battery meter circuits. That is how we get to spend part of our Christmas vacation. To view the actual project website, click here

Right now, the mechanical engineering students are working to get the tracks and motors properly mounted. On the electrical side, we are working hard to get our PCBs finished. I have currently submitted my PCB design to Advanced Circuits.  They have a special discount for students ($33 per two-layer board). I received a phone call from the guy working on my board, letting me know of a couple errors with it, so I think I fixed the problems and resubmitted it to him.  If everything is correct now, I will have my PCB next Friday.  This will give me a few days to make any corrections to the design and resubmit a revision for a second turn.  We need to have our regulators circuit fully functioning by February 2nd.  This has not been an easy task, as we have never done any PCB layouts before.  I had never ever opened any layout software prior to this PCB.  Let me tell you, it is not an easy task.  I have spent hundreds of hours on this and know that I will have errors with my first board.

A recent picture of the vehicle going down stairs:

The control unit.  It's basically an airplane remote with an LCD screen attached.

This is Vincent and me, standing with the vehicle and controller.  The LCD

monitor is displaying the person who is taking our picture.