Wanted: Capstone Project Suggestions

Duh, how about reading it? Or are you asking something more profound?

Never heard of malvino anyway cos I'm ancient

martin

What's a capstone?

John

A device for reading a project idea which does not yet exist would be a truly wonderous thing. But I suspect it's beyond a basic electronics course.

Does anybody know exactly what 'Voltage Amplifiers' encompasses (and excludes)? It's not a familiar technical term to me, though of course its literal meaning is clear enough.

Tim

============================= I thought the thread was about Capstone 30KW microturbines that are being used for landfill gas energy recover.

1. The top stone of a structure or wall.
2. The crowning achievement or final stroke; the culmination or acme.

It's current educational jargon for the final project in a curriculum.

-- John

Ah, a "class project" or a "senior project." Impressive terminology.

Capstone is also a high-end microwave cae suite, I think.

John

Hi, Ed. Malvino is one of the standard texts for technician track courses. It's a good book. But, like any textbook (I think the current edition is over 1100 pages), the teacher will be jumping back and forth and skipping around.

I'd hope by this time you have a pretty good idea of your capabilities and potential in the class. But you may not yet know the things you'd need to knopw to figure out what a real learning experience project would be.

Tell you what. Why don't you try asking the teacher for advice. I'll bet he/she'll be happy to oblige, and offer you suggestions for projects that not only will be worthy of a good grade, but will be a learning experience that will reinforce your classroom experience.

Good luck Chris

Since you're looking at medical equipment repair, you want to do something related to that, like an amplifier for EKG or EEG or EMG, or something to automatically read equipment leakage current, or generate simulated heart waves or something. Maybe you could design the project around a microcontroller, so it could do multiple things. You can get evaluation kits for some of them for less than $100.

-- John

I meant to say, you _might_ want to do something related to that. :-)

-- John

Do hospitals repair their own equipment?

Create a working cell phone jammer that will fit in my pocket and jam cell phones in a 25yd radius around me. You could then market it as a driving safety device which "Keeps others focused on the task at hand, driving"!

snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com wrote:

In message , dated Tue, 12 Sep 2006, Rich Grise writes

There is no RF technology in the course. So, I'd do it at baseband audio. Make an amplifier that converts microphone signals into a current flowing in an n-turn (*) frame antenna, about 0.5 m square. Now make a receiver with a bobbin-type ferrite-cored inductor (around 22 mH) as the magnetic antenna. Talk from your magnetic transmitter to your magnetic receiver.

This is easy to get going, but there's quite a lot of subtlety in there. For example, the signal spectrum is different at different places in the chain.

(*) This will work for any value of n, but there is an optimum value, depending on the supply voltage to your amplifier and the maximum current it can deliver. The antenna has inductance as well as resistance. This has interesting effects, both locally to the amplifier and globally to the system performance, which you can analyse in different ways and write a 3-voume novel on.

In message , dated Tue, 12 Sep 2006, John O'Flaherty writes

The course is all about analogue. Suggesting a microprocessor is predictable but inappropriate.

Our "small-town USA" hospital did, and probably still does, when possible. A year or two ago, I chatted with an older gentleman who had been one of the techs, there. They had a "shop" area with lots of spiffy Tektronix and HP test equipment. Apparently, a lot of medical equipment also needs to be regularly tested.

- Tom Gootee

Or (since I used to be a crossword addict): apogee, peak, pinnacle, summit, top, zenith...

- Tom Gootee

"He who lives in a glass house" should not invite "he who is without sin".

Think about a curve tracer. It can be pretty simple or very elaborate. A signal, pulse or function generator? Switcher type power supply? An audio amp for bench work. A 555 timer from discrete components?

John Ferrell W8CCW

Even if the capstone project is only for the particular course, most analog stuff ends up digitized at some point or other, and it wouldn't hurt to learn something about that process. In any case, he's free to take what he likes and leave the rest.

-- John

In message , dated Wed, 13 Sep 2006, John O'Flaherty writes

But he hasn't learned about microprocessors, so his capstone project is most likely to fail. I wouldn't want that on my conscience.

I gave him something that appears to suit his course, has challenges at several levels but is easy to get working to some extent. It even includes its own yardstick of effectiveness - the range over which communication can be achieved. With the antennas I specified, a range of several feet, even through walls that don't contain significant amounts of metal, is possible.

I used to repair it for an importer. I'd imagine a tech would be useful if they had older equipment.