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Undergraduate Research in Engineering at Rice

Carroll Joseph Ganier, Senior Electrical and Computer Engineering student
Developing a Wireless Sensor Platform
with Dr. Patrick Frantz

My project at the Rene lab has been the ongoing effort to develop a wireless sensor platform. The project has evolved over the summer from a larger, higher power device DWARVES Lite using the Rabbit microprocessor to a smaller form-factor GNOMES. The original DWARVES project was a class project for ELEC424 based on a thesis at Berkeley, but this original attempt to design a board on my part was largely a failure. The idea was still an interesting one, so I undertook to develop the DWARVES Lite revision of the original in June of this summer. We narrowed the focus of the board and cut out the on board camera circuitry that had dominated so much of the original DWARVES design. Having laid out Dwarves Lite, we sent it for manufacture. In the intervening time, I developed software for DWARVES and helped to train the newer lab members. Unfortunately, DWARVES Lite returned with two major flaws in my design work. The first was a failure in the power circuit that shorted power to ground on the battery side of the charge-pump. Adjusting the values of the passive components in the power circuit was unsuccessful. Secondly, the pin map for the SRAM was the incorrect mapping and required rewiring. Powering the board’s power plane directly did yield some improvement in the situation of the board; ultimately it was decided to develop the newer and more focused GNOMES. GNOMES cut out all extraneous communications systems, settling on using the MSP430 micro-controller. The rest of the summer saw my help in reviewing the design of GNOMES, helping to fix schematics and to begin layout. This part of my research has been much more successful, as the device has full functionality with only minor errors in design that are easily fixed or worked-around. I am now writing drivers and software for the GNOMES system, and I hope to develop a paper on the power consumption and algorithms on GNOMES.

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
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