research experience 1

During my undergraduate career, my interest in integrated circuits pushed me to participate in several research projects, and these projects offered me precious experience and knowledge that I could not learn from textbooks. In the Spring Quarter of 2020, I attended one of Prof. Tse Nga Ng’s research group at UCSD. The project is studying whether repetitive behaviors of autistic children have calming effects on their heart rate. My task is to build up such devices with one signal detector and one signal receiver, so the receiver that is connected to the computer can read and record the data from the signal detector on the human body. After a while, I successfully designed such circuit boards with Arduino Nano microcontrollers. However, I met problems with my design: the detector and receivers are connected by wires, which was hard to put on the human body. This means I had to figure out a way to make the connection wireless. This was a completely new field to me, and my partners on the same project were also novice about wireless signal connection. After searching sources like Github, libraries, I finally decided to use XBee-3 microchip as core, and microPython, which is a branch of Python, as codes to fulfill my goal of wireless connection. After I completed the circuits and testing, the signals successfully passed from detector to receiver, however, when we tested on the human body, the signals were very unstable and weird. Due to the truth that microPython was too unpopular and time limitation, it was frustrating that I couldn’t solve this problem. Meanwhile, this research experience raised my coding abilities and taught me much knowledge about circuit designs.