12.13.2009

A very good read

So I have been following a blog for some time. It's not someone that I personally know but her story is very interesting. The Arizona Republic just finished an article on her and its a very good read. It takes a while to read so give yourself some time to read it, but make sure to read it all. Its heart warming. Here it is

http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/stephanie-nielson-intro-120609.html


There is an intro and 10 parts to the story.

12.11.2009

Senior Project

So for my Computer Engineering Senior Project a group of us had to design and build something relevant to our studies. We decided to build dynamic source filtering sunglasses. Our goal was to design some sort of glasses that would blot out bright lights like the sun. We accomplished this by designing a processor that read in brightness levels from a camera mounted about your eye. The processor would then determine which light sources to blot out based on a variable threshold. The processor would then tell the LCD to darken certain pixels. The LCDs were running at 60Hz so it would refresh faster than your eye could move. This allowed our processor to track bright lights and blot them out even when they were moving (or when you were moving). Today was demo day and here are some pictures from it. There were three other senior project teams. Each team had four team members and I was the only girl on any team. All teams successfully completed their projects and our professor announced today that we all got A’s! Here are some pictures from the day:

Here is our group: me, Torrey, Jason and Dan
LCDs and cameras. Notice the sunglasses is front of the cameras. This was because the camera processor would gamma correct and we were not able to interface with it and tell it not to. So therefore we just used some good old fashioned sun glasses to darken what the cameras were seeing.
better view of one LCD and camera
Our processor
closer view
our hand controls. Ever persons eyes sit different and have different head shapes and therefore fit into the hard hat differently. So we had some controls to adjust the cameras.
Our senior project professor trying it out
front view of the whole module