Computer engineering projects for physics. Proposals?

[Samira]

i'm a computer engineering student but i have always been interested in physics and wanted to contribute to it,next semester i will be working on my senior project and i was wondering if any of the physicists here or scientists in general think that there's something that i could create whether it's a software or a device that could help them in their work, I'm not sure if i should be posting this here but I'm hoping i could get a reply, I'm currently collecting ideas to suggest my professors.

 

[DoItForYourself]

You could create a device that measures the temperature of the equipment and pipelines (solid objects) in front of a person and which gives an acoustic sign in case a high temperature reading appears. Perhaps, this could be done by scanning the area in front of a person with a rotating infrared thermometer, attached to the belt of the person.
This device would be very useful especially for people who work in the industry, because it improves safety.

 

[berkeman]

i'm a computer engineering student but i have always been interested in physics and wanted to contribute to it,next semester i will be working on my senior project and i was wondering if any of the physicists here or scientists in general think that there's something that i could create whether it's a software or a device that could help them in their work, I'm not sure if i should be posting this here but I'm hoping i could get a reply, I'm currently collecting ideas to suggest my professors.

What software packages are you fluent in? Have you worked with data acquisition setups in the past? Some of the best interactions between technical software and test hardware that I've been involved with used MATLAB and C and some scripting (Tcl or Python) to simulate communication circuits and iterate on transceiver designs to get maximum performance out of the final ASICs that we designed.

So we would do initial simulations of the communication channel and take our first cut at simulating the transceiver hardware, then build that hardware using FPGAs and discrete analog circuitry and do some initial testing with a real channel. We would digitize the signals on the channel (our comm signals plus the noise plus the distortions introduced by the real channel), and then use that data to re-simulate the transceiver and try various fixes to improve performance.

Being able to use software simulations and work with real data in the simulations and iterating multiple times has resulted in a very robust transceiver design. Without the initial simulations and iterating the prototype hardware, there is no way we could have come up with the amazing performance that we are shipping now as a product.

So you might look for opportunities in physics where such a design paradigm could apply. Something where you can mix software simulationj, data acqusition, hardware prototyping with FPGAs or CPLDs, and and iterative design approach...