Analogue Music Synthesiser

For my first year group project, I worked in a team of 3 to research, design and simulate an analogue music synthesiser. The synthesiser was designed to include key features of commercially available synthesisers. Our synthesiser therefore included:

• a Voltage Controlled Oscillator (VCO) to produce square, triangular and sinusoidal waveforms between 27.5Hz to 4.186kHz
• a Low Frequency Oscillator (LFO) to generate a tremolo or vibrato effect
• a Voltage Controlled Filter (VCF) and Voltage Controlled Amplifier (VCA) to emphasise or remove certain frequencies to produce distinctive sounds
• an ADSR envelope generator module to control the VCA and VCF
• an Output stage to drive a 8 Ohm loudspeaker

This group project was awarded the Head of Department's Highly Commended Group Project and Best Analogue Music Synthesiser Prize. A short audio clip of our simulated synthesiser can be listened to below.

Mars Rover Project

In this project, I worked and collaborated in a team of 7 to develop a Mars rover to autonomously explore an unknown environment. The rover autonomously navigates and maps an alien city consisting of aliens of varying hues, buildings and underground bunkers. The rover was divided into 6 subsystems: vision, control, command, radar, drive, energy. I primarily focused on the drive, energy and battery subsystems.

• The drive subsystem takes instructions from the control subsystem to move around the arena. Using optical flow sensors, the rover position and orientation in relation to its control setpoint can be determined and used as an input to a PID control loop to determine output motor speed. To ensure reliability of optical flow sensor measurement, extensive work was conducted to optimise optical flow sensor performance: an LED light system was developed to reduce sensitivity to changes in ambient lighting; and a dual optical flow sensor configuration was designed to average distance measurements and ensure reliable on the spot turning.
• The energy subsystem is a standalone subsystem that uses solar panels to charge a rover battery through a dual SMPS power electronics interface. To obtain optimal power transfer, a MPPT perturb-and-observe algorithm was implemented and the effect of partial shading was investigated for various PV panel arrangements, resulting in a parallel configuration as the optimal arrangement.

This project was selected as the Heed of Department's Best Second Year Group Project.

Boost Switch Mode Power Supply (SMPS)

In this project, a Boost Step-up SMPS converter was designed, built and tested in collaboration with Prateek Wagle to provide a USB PD (Power Delivery) output from a Li-ion battery. This project was part of the 3rd year Power Electronics coursework. The converter boosts an input voltage ranging from 3V to 4.2V to an output voltage of 5V, 9V, 15V or 20V whilst fulfilling efficiency and current ripple restrictions. Synchronous rectification is used to minimise diode power losses, and a controller was designed to ensure soft-start. The converter was first designed, analysed and simulated in LT SPICE, before Altium was used to design the board layout. Finally, a TI Tiva C series microprocessor was used to control the SMPS.

Function Acceleration on a Digital System

As part of the 3rd year Digital Systems Design module, I designed and implemented a digital system on a DE1-SoC FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array). In this project, I worked with Timothy Newman to accelerate a computationally intensive arithmetic function by implementing dedicated hardware blocks configured on Verilog HDL. To accelerate the computation of cosine within the arithmetic function, the hardware efficient CORDIC algorithm was implemented before various CORDIC architectures investigated to optimise for latency, resources and throughput. Furthermore, the architecture of the overall system was optimise to minimise the critical path and reduce overall latency.

Data Compression for Power Systems

During my research internship with the Digital Energy and Power Systems (DEPS) Group at Cornell University, I worked to emulate a novel data compression scheme designed for Continuous Point-On-Wave (CPOW) and Phasor Measurement Unit (PMU) data. The compression scheme splits a signal into various harmonic subbands (integral multiples of the system frequency) and an interharmonic subband, before active subbands are downsampled and quantised. Received signals at the decoder are then upsampled and interpolation is applied in order to reconstruct the signal. My implementation of the data compression scheme was tested in MATLAB to determine the compression and NMSE (Normalised Mean Square Error) performance of the algorithm for varying test waveforms.

Imperial College Formula Student

I have designed, developed and tested electronic circuits as part of the Imperial College Formula Student Electronics Team. I have worked to ensure the successful operation of a variety of protection circuits according to Formula Student regulations and requirements such as the IMD, BSPD, and TSAL boards. Through Formula Student I have developed my practical circuit skills, learning to use Autodesk EAGLE and take a design specification to functional protection circuitry. The Formula Student team will aim to compete in competition this summer.