Background

Stemming from Greek mythology, Argus was a shepherd with one hundred eyes. It was said that at any given time, at least one eye was always awake.

The purpose of the Argus 682 Project was to design a wireless sensor platform capable of capturing automobile-oriented sensor data and transmitting it wirelessly to a base station for monitoring.

Several iterations of software and hardware engineering were required to render a complete system as our design evolved over a period of 10 weeks.

It looked like this.

The front of the remote control car wired up with all sorts of telematics hardware, remember this was 2002. Aravind even built in working headlights. The back left quarter of the remote control car, on the roof of the parking garage at Ohio State University

The result of our work is captured here.

Group Members

Nate Distel	GPS, Physical Integration
Richard Fouts	Power Management
Solomon Gibbs	Single Board Computer, GUI Development
Aravind Mikkilineni	Single Board Computer, Microcontroller Development
Patrick Stemen	MCU, Command / Control
Max Vilimpoc	Microcontroller Dev, Embedded Serial Sensor Daemon, GUI
Michael Volkerding	Wiring, Logistics

Bill of Materials / Parts Manifest

2 x Microchip PIC 16F877 Microcontrollers running at 4MHz
1 x LINX 900MHz HP-II Series Transmitter / Receiver modules, capable of 50Kbps serial transmission
1 x Abacomm 433MHz Transmitter / Receiver modules transmitting at 9600 bps, with serial (TTL) input
2 x National Semiconductor LM34 Temperature Sensors
1 x Analog Devices ADXL202EB +/- 2G Accelerometer
Garmin GPS25-LVS GPS Receiver (OEM module)
A handful of Maxim MAX233A Serial-TTL ICs (fried one or two of them)

Code Samples

Embedded Serial Sensor Daemon, using Hi-Tech's C Compiler for Microchip PIC

adc.c, A/D Converter C code
adc.h, A/D C Header
capture.c, Capture/Compare Module C code
capture.h, Capture/Compare C Header
edaemon.c, Embedded Serial Sensor Daemon, the core of the sensor module, C code
globals.c, global functions
globals.h, global declarations
gpsrecv.c, GPS Preemptive USART receive handler
gpsrecv.h, GPS C Header
serial.c, USART serial transmission helper functions
serial.h, USART serial transmission headers
essd.zip, ZIP-compressed sources

CrossBow wxWindows User Interface

CrossBow was the interface software built by Max Vilimpoc to interpret the data from the sensor module.

Data packets were polled across the wireless serial interface, and interpreted piece by piece as specified in the packet format.

wxWindows is a cross-platform user interface library written in C++ which is easy to learn and customize as needed.

A screenshot of the user interface developed to capture wireless telematics data from the remote controlled car

One of the handy tricks we used to save on compilation time involved the use of a program called serproxy, which takes care of the dirty work needed to poll a PC serial port. It reroutes serial port output to a TCP/IP socket, which CrossBow then connected to with simpler polling routines.

A screenshot of the serproxy command line output

Team Reports

EE582 Final Report	[pdf]
EE682 Interim Report	[pdf] [doc]

Final Presentation Slides

Click here to view our midterm presentation slides (February 05, 2002). Also in [ppt] and [pdf].

Click here to view the slides we created for our final presentation (March 13, 2002).

Aravind's Photos

An Abacom wireless serial module The RPX lite embedded board An Orinoco Gold 802.11b wireless PCMCIA adapter card with a whole 11 megabits per second of bandwidth The RPX lite board with the Orinoco Gold card plugged in The RPX lite board was based on a PowerPC microprocessor The remote control perfboard The battery charging board Testing laptops running our telematics software Pat running after the remote controlled car after we forgot to build in a keepalive signal and kill switch for out of range conditions Netbooting the RPX lite board A screenshot of our control software for the remote controlled car, running on a Windows CE Pocket PC! Close-up of the sensor board with accelerometer and other sensors A screenshot of the RPX lite flash programming The underside of the remote control car with all the wiring exposed A picture of the croc hunter plastic figure missing an arm, sometimes prototyping is like that The development lab workbench, covered in our equipment

Max's Photos

My old Toshiba 300CT 'ultraportable', which I used for remote sensing development Pat holding the control board for the remote control car Pat and Aravind walking down the Caldwell Labs hall, holding the remote control board and car My laptop connected to the receiver board for wireless data out on the parking garage roof Pat testing out the driving capabilities of the remote control car The remote control car driving on the parking garage roof A close up of the remote control car with all sorts of wires hanging off A close up of Aravind holding the wireless serial transceiver and and inspecting it Nate holding the remote control car off the ground and Pat testing the driving commands Aravind looking at the remote controlled headlights on the car Pat inspecting the remote controlled car A close-up picture of the rear of the remote controlled car with all the wires hanging off A picture from a few feet away of the rear of the remote controlled car with all the wires hanging off Our two control laptops side by side

Last updated: July 22, 2003 ➡️ 1 April 2023 (mobile friendly)