Electrical Engineering:

• A discipline of engineering which focuses on the application of electricity, electronics, and electromagnetism. Electrical engineers research, design and test electronic equipment and systems, ranging from big power generators to tiny circuit boards. They frequently apply math and physics in their work.

Biomedical Engineering:

• A discipline of engineering which combines biology, medicine and engineering to improve human health and medical practices. It is closely related with electrical engineering, since many of the medical systems involve electronics.

What we did:

We first learned about Ohm's law and Boolean Algebra to gain an understanding of the fundamental concepts regarding electronic circuits. Then, using that knowledge, we built one parallel and one series circuit to gain a sense of how they work. We later applied these concepts to create the Medicine Delivery System.

Series circuit:

If the LEDs are all connected to each other, there is a series circuit. These can be identified by their single line of wiring

Parallel circuit:

If there is at least two different paths that the current goes through, there is a parallel circuit.

Ohm's Law

Ohm's Law states that Voltage=Current times resistance, it is key in understanding electricity.

Boolean Algebra

We learned how to create truth tables which indicate whether a variable is on or off using the numbers 1 (on) and 0 (off). Then we learned how to create equations derived from the truth tables, and how to draw logic circuits according to these equations.

Project #1: Medicine Delivery System

We created a representation of a monitoring system that dispenses aspirin for people who have suffered from heart attacks. The system includes a timer which only dispenses aspirin at set time intervals and considers the patients' risk factors (blood pressure, anemia and asthma) at said time. Furthermore, the system alerts the patients when three risk factors are detected.

Sketching and Designing

Simulation

To check if the system was working, we used the simulation program called Yanka. If we had started to build the system without knowing it would work, we would have wasted a lot of materials and time.

Scratch

We also made a simulation of the circuit on Scratch:

https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/230131692/

Building the Logic Circuit

The first part of constructing the circuit was connecting the battery to the switches and then configuring the wiring for the green light. This allowed us to keep the breadboard organized and made it easier to troubleshoot problems. After we got the green LED to work, we continued with the other LEDs in the circuit. The process of building the circuit was admittedly difficult, and connecting wires into the breadboard required a lot of precision and attention, but we eventually succeeded.

Building the Alarm and Timer

As we were building the logic circuit, we also built the alarm and timer circuit using resistors, capacitors, transistors and IC 555. Once we were done building the alarm and timer, we tested them each individually to make sure that they would work when we connected them to the logic circuit.

Final Steps

Lastly we connected the alarm and timer to the logic circuit and tweaked some final things to ensure that the system functioned.