Engineering Design Project by Enrico Cascio at Coroflot.com

Engineering Design Project

Engineering Design Project from Enrico Cascio

Engineering Design Project

In Introduction to Engineering Design my team and I started from scratch and built a fully functioning prototype of a product. Our product was a steering wheel cover that could sense when the driver was dozing off and wake the driver up preventing a collision. We used an infrared LED and photoresistor to measure the drivers heart rate and conductive packing foam to measure the drivers grip pressure. These were inputs to an Arduino Micro which was coded to set off a string of vibration motors and a piezoelectric buzzer when the drivers heat rate drooped too low or the drivers grip pressure decreased. The whole project was documented and compiled into a report that walks through the design process (See View Website).

View Website

The Wrecking Crew (TWC) was picked as a team name on the first day before we decided on a project.

Initial circuit testing for the heart rate monitor. Eventually the heart rate monitor was placed on the steering wheel cover.

We ran into a problem when debugging our heart rate monitor because we couldn't tell if the infrared LED was on or not! I remembered that some cameras could register longer wavelengths of light so I tested my cell phone camera on the TV remote in the room. Surprisingly we determined the Nexus 4 camera could detect the infrared LED but the iPhone camera could not.

Here we were testing the practicality of the conductive packing foam. On one end a battery is connected and on the other the piezoelectric buzzer. As the foam was compressed the resistance of the foam decreased and the buzzer got louder. In our final product the compression is read as a voltage change by the Arduino and the buzzer goes off when the lack of compression is too great.

Soldering the chain of vibration motors

Here we tested the vibration motor chain using a g-force measuring phone app. We used a similar app for measuring the decibel output of the piezoelectric buzzer.