.: What is Senior Design? Senior Design is a two semester class that consists of two parts. In the Senior Design class, a project will be formulated, researched, and built by a group of three to four students. This purpose of this project is to demonstrate the technical engineering skills that the group members have learned in their engineering schooling. The first semester is dedicated to formulating, researching, and designing the project. In this semester the group creates a 120 page technical paper that describes the design for the project in detail, including parts and schematics. During the second semester, the group constructs a fully functional prototype of the project and presents the prototype to a review committee composed of at least three engineering professors and in some cases additional professional reviewers. The presentation takes the form of a critical design review, involving a professional presentation of the design including schematics as well as a physical demonstration of the working prototype. After demonstrating the functionality of the project to the satisfaction of the reviewers, another 120 page document describing the final design and giving a prototype user's manual as well as a 8 page conference paper and project website must be completed prior to graduation.

.: Group D Spring 2010 / Fall 2010 Steven Watson                 Chuck Logan                     Joshua Guinn                    Derrick Nelson Elecrical Engineer              Elecrical Engineer              Elecrical Engineer             Elecrical Engineer

.: The EVADe Project

In today’s bustling world, the streets are filled with a steady stream of vehicles, creating an unpredictable flow of traffic. For modern emergency vehicle drivers, this creates a daunting obstacle to navigate, especially since modern technology is constantly creating new distractions like cell phones and music players that can quickly take a driver’s attention off of the road. These distractions are making lights and sirens, the current method of warning drivers of an approaching emergency vehicle, less and less effective, creating the need for a more advanced warning system. The purpose of this senior design project is to create a possible solution to the problem of giving drivers a more advanced warning of an approaching emergency vehicle so that drivers can take appropriate action to let the vehicle through. When an emergency vehicle turns on its lights and sirens, the emergency alert transmitter is triggered to begin sending out a signal that will alert nearby drivers. The signal from the emergency vehicle will be picked up by the emergency alert receiver in all cars in the area, triggering the receiver to use several methods to alert the driver. The first method of alerting the driver will be shutting off the radio, CD, or other audio input of the car and playing back a prerecorded message in both English and Spanish, informing the driver what type of emergency vehicle (ambulance, fire truck, police, etc.) is approaching. Finally, the receiver will also display an alert message on the dashboard of the vehicle, primarily meant to gain the attention of any hearing impaired drivers or any vehicles without working audio equipment. The project should also include more intricate features to our alert system, namely a Hall-effect compass or GPS to determine which direction the emergency vehicle is approaching from in order to alert the driver if the vehicle is coming from behind them or if they will need to stop because the vehicle is approaching an intersection from a different direction. This will also help to determine if the vehicle is headed away from the car, in which case the receiver would not need to alert the driver. The design for the project will be efficient, small, and cheap enough to be practical for all vehicles in order to give a more advanced notice of an approaching emergency vehicle. It should be practical for any make or model of car so that it could be implemented in any vehicle that is on the road. With powerful technology such as this project in every motorized vehicle, the roads will be made safer as well as help save time for emergency vehicles, which in many instances could mean the difference between life and death.