Low-Power Embedded System Design

Low power energy automonous bird migration tracker system

Semester Project for 2 OR Master Project

Description: Monitoring of bird migration based on ringing has a long history of over one hundred years, but provides only a very limited insight into the live of a bird. Technological advances in sensor miniaturization, low power techniques and 3D integration as well as battery technology and energy harvesting efficiency allow nowadays for miniaturized intelligent tags. In addition emerging telecommunication standards such as LTE-M, LoRaWAN or Sigfox are designed to provide a low data rate wide area back end for IoT devices. Integrating such an LPWAN transceiver would allow for an energy efficient remote data readout to provide research data in real time.

The scope of this project is the implementation of a prototype system, combining a solar energy harvesting system with a lightweight GPS module and a LoRa transciever, utilizing existing components to reduce the workload.

The finished prototype should be used to evaluate the power consumption of the system components as well as to estimate the achieveable location sampling frequency with the available energy budget.

Prerequisites: Knowledge of C/C++ programming, PCB design basics, Measurement basics

Workload: 33% System Design, 33% Software integration, 33% Measurements

Areas: Electronics, Embedded programming, IoT

Supervisor: Christoph Mueller

FPGA Implementation of a Vertcoin Miner

Description: Bitcoin promises distributed transactions, but large FPGA and ASIC based mining farms make the currency quite centralized. Vertcoin is a Bitcoin fork that uses the Lyra2RE mining algorithm that is (allegedly) ill-suited for hardware implementation to prevent centralization. We would like you to try to refute that claim. Hence, the project goal is to devise an FPGA implementation of the Vertcoin mining algorithm, and to compare your implementation against that for high-end GPUs. This should allow us to find out if the Vertcoin fulfil its promise.

Areas: FPGA, VHDL, cryptocurrency, blockchain

Supervisors: Alexios Balatsoukas-Stimming and Pascal Giard

Date added: 18.12.2017