Most of the undergraduate projects, performed by final year students have a system application flavor. Other projects have a research type flavor, some of which have led to publications in international journals and conference proceedings. I would like to briefly describe three projects which received wide publicity in the local media. The first two received competitive national awards from “ IBDAA’ ”. The third received the best paper award at the 2019 IEEE JEEIT conference in Jordan.

1. Design of Analogue GSM Repeater System

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VhhsrODTHh0

The project serves the field of cellular communications and has been suggested by our national mobile operator “Jawwal”.  The motivation stems out from the very long delays for imported repeaters to pass the required security levels by the Israelis and the relatively high costs; in particular the medium power and high power types. The goal was to build a prototype to improve the GSM signal coverage in certain external places and inside multi floor buildings that lack good coverage of signal, to enable communication with the cellular network. The design was an application where the system would amplify the signal and maintain its quality. The components of the proposed Repeater box is a “Donor antenna” typically placed on top of a building and directed to the strongest receives GSM signal. The signal is then transported through coaxial cables inside the building to the Repeater box where the signal is filtered, processed, amplified and transported to the Service antenna, inside the building floors. The Repeater box is remotely controlled, through a microcontroller, which in turn controls technical parameters that govern coverage and performance.

2. Design of Satellite Dish Positioning Control System

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1LVSQFkxxJ5_pqyMZeUEADaj3c5S2_Gr8/view

The design addresses a robust application for the Satellite dish user which enables receiving channels from the available five satellites; NILESAT, ARABSAT, TURKSAT, HORBIRD & AMOS, by using a satellite dish positioning control receiving system with only one receiving satellite dish head instead of three, thus saving on head costs for a wider selection of satellites. It also has a capability to correct the dish’s position; horizontally and vertically in harsh wind and snow weather conditions and can detect any accumulation of snow to activate an electric heater for melting it. The satellite is hence able to automatically self control satellite channel reception, avoid service disruption from weather conditions and save on high costs of maintenance.  It is worth mentioning that some moving satellite dishes in the local market are limited to horizontal movement, lacks positioning accuracy, automatic control and correction of the dish position’s misalignment in harsh wind and snow weather conditions. 

3. Design of an Automated Linear Book-Scanning System

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mAx2JAx4tGY

Digitizing books and documents has become increasingly prevalent amongst libraries and university facilities as large data storage becomes cheaper and more available and physical storage space becomes scarce. There are currently many commercial scanning methods available, but all have trade-offs between speed, reliability, automatic page turning and price. In this project, we proposed the design of an automated linear scanning book system which has several attributes. For a start, the moving saddle by two stepper motors can hold up to 3 Kg. The system contains a suitably designed channel slot, this design has implemented a new variation on the idea of pneumatic page turning. This involves the use of a vacuum cleaner device to pull book pages into a channel that flips them to the other side of the book, in order to allow two installed scanners to take an instant image of the two exposed pages, to use them at a later stage to convert an merge them into a PDF file. The material choice of the system housing was Acrylic. This is because it is easier to laser cut and fabricate, relatively lighter than Aluminum, wood and stainless steel. The interconnection performance is based on “Arduino Uno” and “Raspberry Pi” microcontrollers for controlling the motors, scanners, sensors, switches, vacuum device, in addition to transmitting the images to a desktop or laptop. The overall system operation performance is very satisfactory. However, we recommended a scanner with faster speed, a vacuum device with lower noise. However these were the only available in local markets. Apart for these recommendations, our system is low priced, reliable in page flipping and image storing. Moreover mechatronics design procedure steps have followed in the implementation of the system.