Week 2: Electrical and Biomedical Engineering

1. Students will create virtual and physical processing units that model a device which detects when someone is likely having a heart attack based on indicators of elevated troponin, ST changes on ECG readout, and drops in SpO2. The device will provide status updates for patients with increased risk of a cardiac event. At specific intervals, the monitor will:

• If no indicators exist - illuminate Green LED

• If one indicator is present-  illuminate Yellow LED

• If risk two indicators are present -  illuminate Red LED and transmit symptoms to healthcare provider

• If risk all three indicators are present – Sound alarm, contact emergency services

2. Students will implement the design using AND gate (7408), OR gate (7432), Inverter gates (7404), flip flops (74374) and timing chips (555) 

(Above: EveryCircuit simulation)

1. Describe the plan your group used to build the project.

For this project, we let the people who understood the concept best take the lead while the rest of us focused our time on writing the research papers, reflections, creating the AI chatbot, and the website. We drew out our logic circuit first, and then began building while modeling on every circuit at the same time. When we ran into trouble on the every circuit we would reevaluate our plan. 

2. How did you incorporate the Design strategies from the textbook (Ch 21-26)?

We started by brainstorming the logic gates necessary to complete the task, and from there we used trial and error. Things that looked correct drawn out often didn’t work when it came to building the circuit. Since we were using breadboards, there was no harm to moving the wires and restarting if something wasn’t working, so we found that this was a good strategy to quickly try out all of our ideas.

3. Describe the process your group used to accomplish the task.

Our group would spend our time working on our individual tasks and then at the end would show what we had accomplished. Since building this circuit was harder to do as a full group, we believed it was easier to split up the tasks and work separately and then put everything together at the end.

4. Describe the principles you used to build the project and apply to the engineering fields you studied.

In this project we used electrical engineering concepts such as digital logic, resistance, circuitry, and connections on a breadboard. Learning these principles allowed us to problem solve within our project when things went wrong. Electrical engineering requires us to have knowledge of all its components in order to fix a problem when it goes wrong.

5. Each member’s role in the project.

In this project, Derinsu took the lead on building the large circuit, while Rocco built the timer and alarm circuits. Nolan worked on research papers as well as creating the AI chatbot. Emily wrote the majority of our research papers while Becca started creating the website, formatting the research papers, and writing the reflections.

6. Describe the successes and the obstacles your team encountered and how your team overcame the obstacles.

Our team started pretty strong with the design of the logic gates through the discussions of possible outcomes. However, after the logic gate diagram was drawn, we realized that our diagram was way too complicated and long, so we got help from our TA. Our new diagram was very successful and helped us throughout the whole process of the circuit. We had some trouble with the alarm and it took us pretty long to figure out that the problem was in the 555. Additionally, we were successful in figuring out how to make the timer work. Lastly, we made our timer, but we did not have time to connect the timer to our actual circuit, so we had to rush that part, but we finished at the end.

7. What would your next steps be to improve your project?

Find a more efficient way to construct our circuit. Our circuit had too many wires and it was not planned in detail. It was very hard to understand where mistakes were and how things are connected. It also made adding the alarm and timer more complicated. Therefore, our next step would be to color-code wires and place the gates in different ways so that our circuit is easier to understand and more efficient. 

8. Describe the lessons that you learned and how you will apply these lessons to future projects.

This project has taught us the significance of planning. Even though making a Cad design was recommended by our TA’s, our group thought that it would take us too much time and experimenting with the bread board and gates would lead us to the circuit quicker. In future projects, we will try to create designs and test them out properly to see which parts have a chance of not working and what causes that. Together with the lectures, our team members learned how logic gates work and how a breadboard works. This will be helpful for us in future projects that are related to electrical engineering.

9. Knowing what you know now, how would you start your project differently?

As mentioned in the previous question, we would start with the design of a Cad or a simulation to see if our logic gate diagram would work. Additionally, we would assign color of wires to gates and what the wires connect so that it is easier to find a mistake if any is made.