Cornerstone
Team members:
- Michael Brogdon
- Enrique Conde
- Chad Gill
- Doug Schuyler
We are planning to design and build a sensing system that will make barcodes and current electronic security systems obsolete while making shopping experiences even more enjoyable and efficient. For this, we intend to design a system implementing the use of radio frequency IDs for merchandise, which would allow for electronic identification of the merchandise as well as maintain security.
For this project, we first need to design and build the merchandise-mounted transmitters. For this part of the system, we intend to make 24 bit IDs for the merchandise. Certain considerations we will need to make are the strength of the transmitters, power supplies, frequencies used, interference, and finally, size and economic restrictions. For the prototype, we intend to build four transmitters to show that our system can distinguish merchandise both accurately and precisely.
Another device we intend to create is a new shopping cart, which will read each item and tally the total cost as the customer shops. This part of the system will require the use of either an FPGA or a microprocessor, along with an LCD, a transceiver, and a database of all the merchandise. Considerations for this design include the need for user-friendly programming on both the customer and the employee level (for adding new merchandise to the database, for example), power supplies (possibly implementing an alternator), weatherproofing, and customer safety.
The third and final part of our project that we will design is the checkout interface, or a supplementary system to simulate the checkout. The checkout will receive a signal from the cart and create an itemized readout of the merchandise (while removing the item from the store electronic inventory database). This part of our project will also require either an FPGA or a microprocessor, as well as some kind of display, probably an LCD.