Stair-climbing Mobile Robot

The aim is to design and realize a simple, microcontroller-based embedded system that realizes a robot that is able to go up and down regular stairs with a reasonable speed.

This project needs a minimum of 2 and a maximum of 3 students.

The main goal is to come up with a method for climbing the stairs and realize it using available components.

Web-based Business Card Printing Service (with Dr. Abdul Aziz Al Mulhem)

The students who will select this project will have to come up with a Web design that incorporates the following:

• Customer database
• Template database
• Picture/Photos/Logos database
• Arabic Fonts

The students should choose the right technology for:

• Implementing the business card editor.
• Printing the business cards from a regular printer

SystemC- based Parallel Simulator

Instruction-Set Design and Experimentation tool

This project's goal is to develop an educational tool that will facilitate architectural experimentation for CPU design. The tool will be used by the COE-308 students to perform "real" architectural assignments.

• Describing instructions at the RTL level (not Verilog RTL)
• Design the execution unit (using pre-defined, yet customizable, building blocks like register files, ALUs, etc ...)
• Make general choices for the machine (pipe-line, number o clock cycles, etc ...)
• Map the RTL level to the execution units blocks
• Write assembly programs
• Simulate the programs
• Look at what happens in each block of the execution unit.

The tool is to be realized in software as a GUI-based tool.

Image Processing Projects (Mr. Kamel Chenaoua)

Prototype Design of Pure Material Property Calculator (Dr. Alaaeldin Amin)

500Gbps AES Encryption/Decryption Architecture

In this scope, this project's aim is to explore the feasibility of a 500 Gbps AES encryption/Decryption chip. The project's deliverable is:

• Full design of the solution with processing blocks, memories and interconnection (bus or network) at the RTL level using Verilog HDL.
• Simulation of a typical load that shows how the architecture can handle peaks of 500 Gbps for a reasonable amount of time.

Actionnable WiFi Camera.

The user, on the web-brower, enters the URL of the camera. The camera sends in a welcome page prompting the user to enter his username and password. If the two-matches, the user will be able to go to a page that will continuously stream what the camera is "seeing" in a frame inside the page. The user will also see buttons on the page that, if pushed, will move the camera up, down, right and left. When needed, the camera will signal that it is going to run out of power.

The students taking this project are responsible for components procurements and cost. They may get some help according to availability.

WiFi Campus phone Connected with Fixed Phone System (2 terms project)

• The WiFi-IP phone terminal itself
• The box that links the IP phone to the fixed campus phone system.

This project can be split in two projects conducted in a single term. However the two student groups must collaborate.

Operator-based Gate Access System

• A person comes to the door (outside).
• To identify itself if should
  • Swipe an ID card (magnetic strip for example)
  • Look at a visible camera face clear (no mask)
• The gate-keeper's computer receiving the ID number from the card reader instantly gets the person's information from a database which includes a picture of the cardholder on file.
• The computer also receives a continuous stream from the camera outside.
• The gate keeper can capture a still from the video camera
• The gate keeper can talk to the person outside (through a speaker) to ask him to properly look towards the camera for proper identification purposes
• The computer display both pictures side-by-side
• The gate-keeper identifies the person
• If positive identification, the gate-keeper opens the door otherwise he follows appropriate security directives for this case

The students should propose a solution that makes the system low-cost, robust and easy to use (training of personnel)

To have a universal reading, the easiest way is to use image capture to simply take a snapshot of the meter and transmit this snapshot on a wireless interface to the agent outside.

The agent should be able to come by car to collect the information about the meters in a selected neighborhood. The terminal is operated as follows:

• The terminal displays the meters in a certain location
• The agent selects a meter to read from a meter database.
• The terminal sends a read request to the selected meter
• The selected meter takes a snapshot of its front by a permanently attached low-cost camera
• The snapshot image file is compressed and transmitted back to the terminal
• The file is saved in the terminal for further use.
• The value of the reading can either be read by a human on a screen and manually entered or automatically recognized by OCR/image processing software. This part is out of the scope of this project.