Recently, Devin, Carol, and I helped with the UNH KEEPERS Camp “Biomedical Engineering” Day. The children were able to have tours of Professor Wayne Smith’s lab, build simple parallel and series circuits, and create their own “Operation”-style board games. The picture below is of me and a student displaying his “Operation” game. It was great witnessing children being exposed to the fields of eletrical and biomedical engineering at such a young age, and they all seemed very interested and intrigued by the science behind the technology they use in their day-to-day lives. I hope every participant will further their understanding of engineering and pursue an education in the field.

-Erika Swanson

Project54 assisted with two sections of KEEPERS summer camp. It turned out to be a great way for the second to fifth grade students to explore electrical and computer engineering. Mark gave tours to groups of the students of a Project54 lab and a police cruiser. While he did that, Erika, Devin and I helped the other students build simple parallel and series circuits that lit a light bulb. It was eye opening to see how fast they caught on to the general ideas of circuiting, even to the point where Devin started to explain Ohm’s Law to them. With knowledge of this they created their own Operation game shown in the pictures below. Both groups of eager students seemed to finish the half day with more knowledge and inquiry of engineering than they started with. I am grateful to have taken part in that.

Carol Perkins

One of the current projects in development here at CATLab is the Project54 mobile software for the Dover Police Mounted Patrol Unit. Combined with the Motorola Symbol MC5574, our Project54 mobile software allows the mounted officers to fill out their required contact cards quicker and more efficiently than writing the information on the card directly. The video below depicts a side-by-side comparison between writing a Dover Police Field Contact Card versus filling out the same information using our Project54 mobile software on the Motorola Symbol MC5574.

Mark Taipan

Last week, undergraduates from the Project54 lab visited the KEEPERS camp. KEEPERS stands for Kids Eager for Engineering Program with Elementary Research-based Science. The purpose of the camp is to get young children interested in engineering. One of the tours that the camp went on was a trip to Professor Wayne Smith’s Biomedical Engineering lab, where campers learned about how electrical engineers design prosthetic limbs that react to signals from the brain. Chris Bancroft, a recent graduate of the UNH ECE masters program, gave a demonstration to the campers of how the technology works. He attached electrical leads to his arm and explained to the campers that when a person with a prosthetic limb moves their arm, the brain sends signals to the muscle. That is where the leads pick up the signals and send it to a microcontroller. In the demonstration in the lab, Chris had the microcontroller attached to pneumatic pumps that forced air into a muscle-like air bladder. He explained that when the signals from the brain are picked up by the muscle, they are amplified and then sent to the microcontroller which decides which pumps to turn on and move the muscle, lifting a wooden arm.

Devin Mullen

Recently, users of Project54 have reported that the USB devices connected to their in-car computers at random would not power up correctly. Typically, a system reboot would solve the problem and power up the devices, but this situation is not ideal. The police officers using the Project54 application need all USB devices to consistently perform, and rebooting their computers is time consuming. Carol Perkins and I set up a diagnostic test in which 5 USB devices, including a GPS, wireless antenna, touch screen monitor, video adapter, and scanner, were set up in 5 different USB port configurations with a CoolGear USB hub. As shown in the figure below, two devices, the video adapter and the Symbol Scanner DS6707, had issues booting up. The Symbol Scanner did not power on 14% of the 50 trial runs. Of these 7 failures, twice the device booted initially, but eventually powered down without instruction. The figure below also shows that the power failures occurred while connected to 4 different ports, so we concluded that the reported problem was not due to any power allocation problems within the USB hub. When powered correctly, this scanner performs exceptionally well, so users will be asked to unplug and then replug the scanner when a power up is not successful. 

- Erika Swanson

Note: This post originally appeared on the Project54 website.

Here at Project54, we have opportunities to provide cutting-edge technology to not just law enforcement agencies but to local fire departments and to the National Guard as well. The National Guard from Concord, NH has a military utility vehicle used in responding to massive hazardous material situations. While the vehicle is out in the field amongst the hazardous chemicals, the troops need to relay information about these chemicals (and the environment) back to the command center vehicle, located elsewhere in a safe area. Project54 engineers had developed a system to provide both a computer interface to collect data from all their instruments and a wireless network between the command center vehicle and the field utility vehicle. Below are a few photos of the National Guard’s utility vehicle. Feel free to see more photos here at our Flickr account.

I would like to mention that it was a pleasure meeting these folks. Thank you for your service and if you ever have a chance to speak with them (they perform HazMat demonstrations here at UNH) I recommend doing so!

Mark Taipan

While most desktop developers do not have to deal with Serial COM ports (and I doubt many people miss it), here at Project54 we use COM ports to communicate with a variety of devices (GPS Antennas, Radars, Video Systems, etc.). For anyone that is familiar with programming COM port communication in the Win32 platform, they will most inevitably use the same functions (e.g. CreateFile(), ReadFile()) as outlined here at MSDN.

Like other communication protocols, one has to consider whether to use synchronous or asynchronous communication. With COM ports, asynchronous transmission is defined by using an OVERLAPPED structure and combining it with events to watch out for. For synchronous communication, one would omit the use of the OVERLAPPED structure and will replace it with the use of the COMMTIMEOUT structure (which allow programmers to define the timeout parameters for the ReadFile() and the WriteFile() commands). Most of the time, using this COMMTIMEOUT structure will cause expected timeouts and stop the ReadFile() and the WriteFile() functions from blocking indefinitely. However, there is a case where this is NOT true.

When using Virtual COM Ports, performing synchronous communication will cause the ReadFile() and the WriteFile() to block, regardless of the timeouts you define in the COMMTIMEOUT structure. The workaround to this is to make sure you use the OVERLAPPED structure for asynchronous transmission and define a timeout in a WaitSingleObject(). Below is a piece of example code for asynchronous COM communication.

Also, check out this great resource for serial communication with Visual C++.

OVERLAPPED overlapStruct; // Overlap structure for asynch. serial comm.
memset(&overlapStruct,0,sizeof(overlapStruct)); // Zero out the overlap structure

// Handle used to correlate an event with receiving data at the overlap structure
HANDLE hReadEvent = CreateEvent(NULL,TRUE,FALSE,L”COMRx”);

// Correlate the overlap structure with the event
overlapStruct.hEvent = hReadEvent;

// Number of bytes received by the overlap structure
DWORD bytesRet;

// Buffer for data
char gpsBuffer[1024] = {’\0′};

// Let’s try open the given COM Port
if ((hComPort =
CreateFile(L”\\\\.\\COM1″, GENERIC_READ | GENERIC_WRITE,
0, // exclusive access
NULL, // no security attrs
OPEN_EXISTING,
FILE_ATTRIBUTE_NORMAL,
NULL )) == (HANDLE) -1 )
{
// ERROR: Looks like we failed to open the COM Port.
return -1;
}

// Try grab the data from the buffer
ReadFile(hComPort, gpsBuffer, sizeof(gpsBuffer)-1, (LPDWORD)&numRead, &overlapStruct);

// Wait for data to come in through the OVERLAPPED Structure (COM Port)
if(!HasOverlappedIoCompleted(&overlapStruct))
{
// Time-out after 5 seconds if we do nothing has happened with the handle
WaitForSingleObject(hReadEvent,5000);
}

// Let’s check to see if we have a result
int iResult = GetOverlappedResult(hComPort,&overlapStruct,&bytesRet,FALSE);
if( (iResult) && (bytesRet > 0) ){
//
// Got some data from the COM Port
//
}

Mark Taipan

The year 2009 has been a busy one for Project54.  We began the year off in February by moving from our garage facility in Madbury to a garage located on campus and within Morse Hall.  The transition of the group from two locations into one has been seamless and has worked out beautifully.  We now have all of our personnel and equipment housed in the same location.

In early May we held an open house to show off our new location as well as to celebrate our 10 year anniversary.  Hard to believe it has been 10 years for the project already.  The weather was great and we had a good turnout with a nice mix of law enforcement, fire dept and campus personnel.

The middle of March brought upon us a flurry of outreach activity beginning with our participation in the UNH High Tech Day a program put on by the Computer Science, Computer Engineering and Electrical and Computer Engineering departments for area high school students, ECE Open House to welcome freshman along with a steady stream of demonstrations and tours provided to visiting organizations and high schools that has continued through out the year totaling over 500 visitors!

In April we were fortunate enough  to have the opportunity to host Paul Green for a visit to our lab. He gave a great talk on Human Factors Engineering and spent the day visiting us and answering all of our questions.

Amidst our outreach activities demonstrating the Project54 system we have been busy traveling to a variety of conferences, where we have written and had papers and posters accepted for presentation as well as busy with developing and running a number of experiments. For example, Mike Farrar’s experiment “Using Voice to Tag Digital Photographs on the Spot” conducted to determine how effective voice could be in the tagging of photos. Some other experiments by Nemanja Memarovic, Alex Shyrokov and Zeljko Medenica using our driving-simulator and eyetracker to collect a variety of data pertaining to distracted driving and navigation.  During this time we were also busy with recruiting activities leading to the hire of Mark Taipan, a recent BS graduate and former student of Project54. We were very fortunate that Mark accepted the offer for our Research Project Engineer position and is now a staff member of the Project.  Welcome, Mark we are happy to have you as part of the P54 team!

One of the great things about this project is that we have a lot of great students that work with us but the time always arrives where they reach graduation and it seems all too quickly we have to say goodbye. This year we have said goodbye to undergraduates Matt Lape, and David Garneau along with graduates Mike Farrar, Nemanja Memarovic and very soon Alex Shyrokov who is currently preparing his Ph.D defense.  Lastly, Ivan Elhart is leaving us to return to his home country of Serbia. Ivan, thank you for all of your work with the handhelds. Undergraduate, Eric Ojala, who has been with us for roughly a year has also contributed greatly to progress on the handhelds and is, unfortunately for us, leaving to pursue a new position.  Good luck to everyone and thank you for all of your hard work on the project, you will be missed.

So now we are left with working on bringing more students to the project, new undergraduate faces we have currently working on the project are Devin Mullen, Erika Swanson, and Mike Litchfield who started earlier this year and we welcome new Graduate Research Assistants, Dylan Fransway and David Filipovic, who will be starting in January.

It has been a fun and productive year with the new year just around the corner.  Let the holidays begin!

~Erika C.

Here at Project54, we work extensively with New Hampshire State Police. Subsequently, we have one of their 2006 Dodge Chargers for demonstrating and testing the Project54 system. One of my colleagues here at the University of New Hampshire, Daniel VanderClock, recently took the opportunity to take some photos of the interior and exterior of the car (some photos are shown below). The entire outstanding set can be seen on our Flickr account here.

Thanks Dan for your all of your wonderful work and we look forward to your future photo shoots!

Mark Taipan

Last Friday, a few of us from P54 attended a day long student conference geared towards human factors and ergonomics. The conference was very interesting, showcasing about 20 presentations dealing with various fields. Three of us from P54 (only ones from NH) gave presentations on our current research. I gave my presentation on our research on the multitouch display with geotagged & oriented photos.

It was a valuable experience for me, since I have not yet given a presentation to so many people whom I did not know. Of course, I was nervous at first, but it went away as my presentation started, and went well overall. I’m sure I will have to make more of these types of presentations in the future, so it was very good practice. Aside from my presentation, I also enjoyed a lot of other things from the conference. One of the other presentations was focused on controlling fully automated search and destroy robots in the field, and how often the person controlling them should reassess the goals and priorities of the robots.

Also the girl in the picture (one of three presenting) had an amazing voice. We all agreed she should be on radio or something, or a professional presenter. Mark and Zelijko gave awesome presentations too, and we all enjoyed some Friday evening rush hour traffic from Boston. It was great!

Mike Litchfield