HELP!!! Please need project ideas

[bully_victim]

hello :wink:
wondering if you can help
need some ideas for my HNC electronics project and im fresh out
needs to be quite complicated but not over the top.....
was going to make a complete plant nuturing system for a greenhouse.... but im not sure if this will be complicated enough for my lecturer (hes abit essentric and likes stuff complicted so it expands our minds)
got £50 budget for parts
so ne ideas any one

 

[trikebuilder]

Project idea

An interesting project might be that of an electronic control system that monitors the position of a weight suspended in a large tube (to block any wind effect) on an elastic cord. The system could monitor the position of the weight from the bottom and top with a transmitting led and a led receiver, thus creating a null bridge between top sensors and bottom sensors. Any movement of the weight is a shift due to outside forces and so this system is able to maintain a highly sensitive position reference. Use similar simple systems to monitor each of the three axis, and you have created a very sensitive seismograph. Any displacement can be tracked in 3-D on a video monitor (as well as recorded digitally), and allow you to generate a visual picture of that displacement for use in locating direction, angle of approach, and intensity of any seismic event. Usable in anything from a state of the art seismograph for serious field work, to the heart of a truly critical performance alarm system for a high tech, high-security application.

Led sensors, null bridges, signal conditioning, digital position to analog output, (and use a basic stamp for the CPU, and a small laptop for the visual signal imaging.) None of these sub-systems is difficult, yet the marriage of all of these into a working system with actual real world potential will be a test of your electronics skills and your imagination.

 

[IONtheFROG]

Project Idea

Here's an idea for you (but I must be brief as I am due at meeting).

Build an anemometer (wind speed indicator) with a digital readout of the wind speed. If you want to get fancy, implement an interface to your computer to allow you to chart the results in some spreadsheet/graphing application (such as Microsoft Excel). If you need "really fancy", upload this data to your webpage (if you have one) and set it to be updated every few minutes or so. You sound compitent enough to handle the design perspective. I don't think this is as cool as trikebuilder's suggestion but it would be more practical to people that have access to your data.

 

[tansis]

Grovel before your teacher for he is indeed wise, and practising what is known as heurism.
(dont anyone tell him what it means, got to find out for himself!)

How about an old favourite, the inverted pendulum, basically getting a stick with a mass on the top to stand upright and recover from being toppled, good all round work out for servo drives , opamps and logic.
Have yet to see any student manage it in two diemensions yet.