St. Norbert College CSCI 225 - Machine Organization
Projects 2010

Bar Code Scanners Danielle Berchmans, Mary Spies
Bar Codes are part of everyday life, and very few take the time to think about how the information is stored in the black and white lines. For our project, we researched bar codes in its different forms (1D, 2D and 3D) and learned more about how a scanner reads the information stored. We programmed a scanner to read a driver’s license (2D barcode) and used the information scanned to determine if the driver is over 21.

Touch Screen Technologies Gwynn Fewell, Eric Strebel

Touch screens have become more and more popular over the past couple years. This evolving technology has become a large part of consumer goods. Touch screens allow people to interact with a computer without the use of a mouse or keyboard, giving them hands on interaction with the applications. This project looks into the different kinds of touch screens and software that are available today and how they came about. It also gives experience of hands on use with the different kinds and where the technology is headed in the future.


Digital Rights Management: An Overview Kayla Pope, Joseph Stawicki, Jacob Yorton

Our project will briefly discuss several types of protection used by various companies, and we will expand on Apple’s use of FairPlay. We will also consider the ethical question of why one might want to crack their personal software. We will discuss and demonstrate one algorithm for hacking a program on a small program written specifically for the purpose of learning how to crack.


Viruses HanQin Cai, Matteo Toffolon

The project will discuss how viruses work, in general. - Specific types; what they do differently from each other. - Infection methods; how it gets into your system / spreads once in your system. - Specifics on file alteration; what exactly it does to a file. - Famous viruses (?) popular virus payloads. - Hopefully, a virus of my own writing that does something mischievous.


Robots Joel Rodriguez

I created a C++ interface that uses the COM ports to communicate via BlueTooth to an IRobot create. The high level language communicates with the IRobot using low level language. It uses commands like 128 137 1 144 to make the robot go forward. Similar code is used to make the IRobot go backwards and turn to the right, the left and stop using the arrow keys on the laptop KeyBoard. It recognizes when an obstacle is in front, and the reaction to this is the IRobot plays a tune and turns 180 degrees to go the direction where it was coming from. The other part of the program is a function that allows you to give the IRobot a angle in degrees and a distance in centimeters. The Irobot turns to the angle and travels the distance the user gives it.


Color Camera Detection Paul Fischer, David Schneider, Micah Wheeler

Our project is looking at how color cameras work. We consider the different ways and applications color cameras read and use these colors. Our hands-on portion is on a CMU camera that follows a specific color. We are going to use the demo program for the camera which takes 5 seconds to see a color and follows it. We have found the two different ways that color is inputted through different styles of camera, the different spectrums (RGB vs.YUV), and multiple uses for each type of camera.