Overview
This is a virtual display of my heartbeat sensor I (with a lab partner) made, debugged, and presented for Purdue’s ECE 20008 Lab.
Pipeline: IR LED -> finger -> phototransistor sensor -> filtered signal (high pass, low pass) -> 1bit ADC -> LED indicator
Demo video:
Key Points
- Each module in the pipeline was individually tested, confirmed, and integrated. Using this method, the project was sucessful overall!
Details
Full technical details, SPICE schematics, and oscilloscope measurements in writeup here: Final Project Report
Lessons Learned / Conclusion
This project was a clear visual indicator of my EE progress: I was able to make a working ‘machine’ with just components– a result greater than the simple sum of its parts!
Each part was so much more complex than expected. However, I was able to create a final writeup summarizing these struggles, and I learned how to better judge the difficulty of ECE projects (you can’t just prompt hardware!). Overall, from this experience, I better understand the concepts of signal processing (preprocessing: filters, ADC) and the role of electrical engineering in fullstack systems: EE primarily servces as the interface between digital systems and the real world, acting as a grounding force (to make it actually exist and interactable) and the main IO mechanism / connector (the systems are digital, but the connectors are always analog).
Using this information, I better know what I want to do in the future!