Senior Design

I have a senior design project comming up starting in January. I am an Electrical Engineering student. I also will be limited with money. I just want to avoid programming(if at all possible). I am looking for any ideas that any of you guys might have. Thanks for all your help and ideas that anyone will be able to give.

What about a Low Cost Remote Control Helicopter?

An AC mains power meter that measures true power consumption.

A few comments -

A. Do you have any areas of interest such as music, robotics, etc - where electronics might be applied? If you have to work on a project it might as well support other areas of interest.

B. Programming seems to be a huge part of electronics today that I'd encourage you not to be so deliberate in avoiding it. As a hobbyist I find that I can no longer avoid it. PIC, BASIC Stamp, PICAXE are among the common lower cost programmable devices.

I sorta like high power stuff. I wanted to do exploding wire, but I was not permitted due to it being done a lot already. That is why I came on here to asked for suggestions on what to do. I have a classmate that wants to do something with music and he is having problems with being aloud to do that also. Robotics would be really cool and fun i think.

I know I shouldn't avoid programming. I have learned how to program a PIC, Z80, and 68K. We learned them all at the same time and it was very confusing. I also have done programming in VHDL, C++, and LabVIEW. It is something I know I wouldn't do on my spair time for fun. I don't mind programming in VHDL. So if I had to choose one that would probably be the one that i would pick.

A harmonic distortion meter.

A puresinewave inverter.

A variable speed AC motor drive.

Solid State Tesla Coil

what about the artificial limbs , like artificial hand or leg

here are a few that I have done that are impressive to look at, and not too expensive.

Electromagnetic linear accelerator....Rail gun, using lorence force, big capacitors, and and a little machining skill, not to mention some creative work on a switch that doent self destruct, you can shoot pennies through trees. You can build your own capacitors, which is in itself a fun project, but getting the farads you need might be a little difficult.

Electromagnetic can crusher.....Using ultra high power pulses through a thick wire coil, you can crush aluminum cans.

Coil gun.....this is probably your best bet, and has the most potential for using some fun electronics that do not need programing. A single stage, with one coil drawing a projectile into the middle of it, then being turned off before it reaches the center is easy to build. A multi stage would be the fun one. Two or more stages where when one coil shuts off, the next in line turns on, continuing the acceleration process. You could have "eyes" on each coil telling it to cut power at a certain time, and triggering the next stage. silent, powerful, fun.

Check out sam barrows power labs, on google. good ideas, I stole most from him. lol, but all were fun to build

Tortuga0303 said:

Electromagnetic linear accelerator....Rail gun, using lorence force, big capacitors, and and a little machining skill, not to mention some creative work on a switch that doent self destruct, you can shoot pennies through trees. You can build your own capacitors, which is in itself a fun project, but getting the farads you need might be a little difficult.

Electromagnetic can crusher.....Using ultra high power pulses through a thick wire coil, you can crush aluminum cans.

Coil gun.....this is probably your best bet, and has the most potential for using some fun electronics that do not need programing. A single stage, with one coil drawing a projectile into the middle of it, then being turned off before it reaches the center is easy to build. A multi stage would be the fun one. Two or more stages where when one coil shuts off, the next in line turns on, continuing the acceleration process. You could have "eyes" on each coil telling it to cut power at a certain time, and triggering the next stage. silent, powerful, fun.

Check out sam barrows power labs, on google. good ideas, I stole most from him. lol, but all were fun to build

Click to expand...

If you do any of these, be extreamly careful as the caps will cause instant death if touched

hmmmm, yea probably should have mentioned that, the safest one to complete would be the coil gun, but still lethal power none the less. when I built myself a railgun, the capacitor bank was powerful enough to start water on fire...Electrolysis....making hydrogen and oxygen, and some cool flames

A mains harmonic distortion meter is pretty safe especially if you use a transformer to measure the voltage.

How hard are rail guns to build...that work properly? If they are hard to build is there something else that easier that works kinda in the same way?

I go to a small Christian school...I doubt they will allow me to make a rail gun for my senior design..but if its not too expensive and not too hard I think it might be fun to do it myself.


Thank all of you for your suggestions...its helping me a lot...I am not sure what my advisor will allow me to do but I am getting a lot of help and idead from all of you and I greatly appriciate it...so thanks again.

well I can tell you my experiance.

One...this is not a weapon! this will get a big no from your superiors, it is linear accelerator, much like magneticly levitate train.

I accidentally took a physics class my sophmore year in college that was wayyyy to easy, so I negotiated with the prof and ended up doing a large project instead of going to 8 am class everyday. So began the railgun.

Things you will need to take into consideration:

The principle is simple, you have two rails, and a projectile that makes contact with the rails. Since current flows through the the rails and projectile, a magnetic field is produced which pushes the projectile out the rails. LOTS of power must be put through the rails in a very short time, hence the use of capacitors.

So much power that the projectile WILL weld to the rails almost regardless of material. This means that the projectile must have an initial velocity before comming in contact with the rails. I used a pneumatic launch system, when the projectile hit the rails, it completed the circuit and set it all in motion.

The projectile will only be able to be shot once or twice, due to the fact that the arching power will degrade the metal. Hard steel should be used for the rails so that there is less damage done to them, none of this 1040 stuff you find everywhere.

What ever you use to connect the launch system to the rails (pneumatic one in my case) it must be non conductive so as not to complete the circuit. there must also be enough velocito so that the inital contact with the rails does not weld the projectile to them.

You must have enough voltage to create a strong magnetic field and bridge any gaps inbetween the rails and projectile, but not so much that there are arcs between the rails with no projectile in them.

Large capacitors are expensive, you can build your own, there are tutorials online.

You must decide on a good combination of parallel and series cells of capacitors to get the right current / voltage you want.

You can make small rail guns, not nearly as impressive, but they do demonstrate the effect.

Charging the capacitors can be dificult when you need something like 4000 volts, You can build your own, use a voltage multiplyer circuit, or a transformer in combo with a full wave rectifier circuit to turn it to DC voltage, or you can do what I did and buy a power source online, mine was used for medical devices and went up to 6000v.

I recomend that if this is what you want to do for cheep, build it small, read ALOT of what others have done, and start really early, you will run into alot of problems on the way.

Tortuga0303 said:

here are a few that I have done that are impressive to look at, and not too expensive.

Electromagnetic linear accelerator....Rail gun, using lorence force, big capacitors, and and a little machining skill, not to mention some creative work on a switch that doent self destruct, you can shoot pennies through trees. You can build your own capacitors, which is in itself a fun project, but getting the farads you need might be a little difficult.

Electromagnetic can crusher.....Using ultra high power pulses through a thick wire coil, you can crush aluminum cans.

Coil gun.....this is probably your best bet, and has the most potential for using some fun electronics that do not need programing. A single stage, with one coil drawing a projectile into the middle of it, then being turned off before it reaches the center is easy to build. A multi stage would be the fun one. Two or more stages where when one coil shuts off, the next in line turns on, continuing the acceleration process. You could have "eyes" on each coil telling it to cut power at a certain time, and triggering the next stage. silent, powerful, fun.

Check out sam barrows power labs, on google. good ideas, I stole most from him. lol, but all were fun to build

Click to expand...

Now that sounds fun

Tortuga0303 said:

well I can tell you my experiance.

One...this is not a weapon! this will get a big no from your superiors, it is linear accelerator, much like magneticly levitate train.

I accidentally took a physics class my sophmore year in college that was wayyyy to easy, so I negotiated with the prof and ended up doing a large project instead of going to 8 am class everyday. So began the railgun.

Click to expand...

Have you got any piccys?

I have some movies, Ill try and grab some pics from it, the project itself is at a friends storage shed, but if I get to it anytime soon ill take some. maybe ill post the vids on youtube and put a link up

here is one of the vids of it, the guy kneeling in front is my partner in crime steve, im the guy right behind him that stays in the frame longer.

When im kneeling down im charging up the pneumatic injection system that is trigered by a solenoid sprinkler valve from outside the frame of the camera. one of the junctions was loose on the capacitor bank which created a large spark and actually pernamently welded one of the junction bars to the capacitor. this was a failed firing because of it, lots of power was lost, but it still was quite strong.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=97iLO0v5jDM

Geez that is a lot of power