May 7, 2003

Electrical and Computer Engineering Senior Projects Fill Ballroom in Talley Student Center

Members of the Wulf Solutions team stand next to their poster, which describes their student-run company and their cluster computing project. Team members are (left to right) Leigh Garner, Mohammad Hamdan, Jon Cage, Robert Fleming, Steve Wehmeyer and Oliver Serang.		Catherine Do and Sherman Pope were part of a team that built an automated bird cage that detects and replenishes empty water and food bowls and removes waste and debris from the cage.
(left to right) Tashika Hassay, Wilson White and Ronald Funderburk created a real web alert service that provides free local e-mail and phone reminders.		David Williams stands under his Ultra Sonic 3-D Tracker, which can detect the x, y and z coordinates of an object.
(left to right) Jorge Rivera and Stephen Adu demonstrate their electronic pet door. A transmitter in the pet’s collar and a receiver on each side of the pet door allow the pet to pass through the door but lock the door 12 seconds later.		Fred A. Olds Elementary School sponsored this project to automate a cafeteria stoplight that monitors noise levels. Pictured are (left to right) team members Charlee Fansler, Donny Lunsford and Bradley Aycock.
Nekton Research sponsored this senior project. Pictured are (left to right) Michael Fulbright and William Gates with an autonomous underwater vehicle. They designed a server-client-based program that would allow the server to communicate with the underwater vehicle.		Tim Ringeman also worked on a Nekton Research-sponsored project. The autonomous underwater vehicles use sensors to collect environmental data. Ringeman created the FAT 32 File System program that can retrieve data if the vehicle should sink.
Photos: Kathi McBlief

A cafeteria stoplight, an automated bird cage, an ultra sonic 3-D tracker, a web alert service and an electronic pet door were just a few of the projects that filled a ballroom in the Talley Student Center at North Carolina State University May 2. Table after table displayed informative posters and intricate projects from the electrical and computer engineering senior design project course.

One team of students, as part of NC State’s Entrepreneurship Program, created a mock company to serve the life sciences industry’s need for less expensive data analysis. Their company, “Wulf Solutions,” is made up of ten students: four senior design executives and six employees ranging from freshmen to seniors. The team built a cluster computer, evaluated its performance, wrote data analysis software and compared the cluster and their software to existing technologies. They found that the performance of their cluster computer was comparable to traditional supercomputers but was much less expensive and their software analyzed data faster than existing neural network packages.

Almost 200 electrical and computer engineering students displayed projects.

— mcblief —

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