Author Archives: R-B

Google’s Littlebox Challenge offers $1,000,000 prize for designing a smaller inverter

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Google and IEEE have jointly announced the Littlebox Challenge, offering One million US dollar prize for designing the most efficient and compact size inverter that would convert direct current from devices such as solar panels and batteries into alternating current for use in homes, businesses, and cars.

Littlebox challenge

Littlebox challenge

Inverters are the essential boxes that take direct current from devices such as solar panels and batteries and turn it into alternating current for use in homes, businesses, and cars.

The problem is household inverters are too big—roughly the size of a picnic cooler. Making them smaller would enable more solar-powered homes, more efficient distributed electrical grids, and could help bring electricity to the most remote parts of the planet.

That’s where you come in: figure out how to shrink an inverter down to something smaller than a small laptop (a reduction of > 10× in volume) and smaller than everyone else, and you’ll win a million dollars (and help revolutionize electricity for the next century).

Portable face recognition system using an 8-bit AVR microcontroller

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Two Cornell students, Brian Harding and Cat Jubinski, made a standalone face recognition system for access control as their final project for their ECE4760 course. Our goal was to create a portable low-cost system. Their design is based on Atmel ATmega644 8-bit microcontroller and uses a C3088 camera module with an OmniVision OV6620 CMOS image sensor. Face recognition is based on eigenface method.

Face recognition system

Face recognition system

Build an Internet-controlled car with live video feeding

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This Internet-controlled car allows you to remotely drive around through a web interface. A wireless IP camera mounted on the car allows you to monitor the surrounding space from remote through live video feeding. The project uses a standard R/C controlled car, where the remote control device is modified to receive commands from an Arduino board through Ethernet connection.

Internet-controlled car

Internet-controlled car

Automatic timer for sprinkler

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This ATtiny25-based automatic timer project is built to control a water sprinkler. The timeout delay is adjusted using a potentiometer, while the on/off operation of the timer is controlled through a tact switch.

Automatic timer for water control

Automatic timer for water control

On the software side, upon power up, the timer flashes the status light to count out the delay in minutes.  10 flashes correlates to 10 minutes.  The ADC reads the potentiometer just during the power up and calculates the delay for further use.  So to change the delay, you first unplug the timer, set the delay, then plug it back in.  This way it will hopefully prevent accidental changes and noise from changing the delay. To use the timer, you press the button once – the timer starts, the valve opens and the status light turns on.  After the delay has elapsed, the timer will shut off, valve closes and the status light shuts off.  If you want to turn it off early, then you just push the button and everything turns off.  I also made use of the watchdog timer to prevent software issues from keeping the valve open.  In the event that a watchdog reset occurs, the initial startup code will catch it, begin flashing the power LED and prevent further use until being power cycled.

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