UPR-Mayagüez team takes 3rd place in Texas Instruments competition
From left: Jesús R. Torrado-Diaz; Javier R. Rivera-Collazo and Eduardo G. Rodríguez-Galindo.
A trio of students from the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez were awarded third place in the Texas Instruments Incorporated sixth annual “Analog Design Contest Engibous Prize,” an analog design award that showcases the imaginative spirit and inner competitive streak of today’s aspiring innovators, the company announced Tuesday.
The students — Javier R. Rivera-Collazo, Eduardo G. Rodríguez-Galindo, and Jesús R. Torrado-Diaz — used TI parts in the construction of their project.
The students developed an easy-tune automatic guitar tuning system. With simple strums of the guitar strings, it automatically tunes all strings in the guitar.
It uses six sensors to convert the vibration of each string into electrical signals.
“Each signal is sent to a C2000 microcontroller that will condition the signal, apply FFTs to calculate the frequency spectrum for each string, and then the microcontroller uses this information to send a signal to turn the tuning heads in order to adjust the frequency of each string to its proper value,” Texas Instruments officials said in a statement announcing the winners.
The UPR-Mayagüez students received $5,000 as a cash prize for their achievement.
The local team followed first place winner Adam Munich from the Rochester Institute of Technology and second place winners Justin Bohr, Mike Mock, Nate Kesto, Yuan Mei, Chaoli Ang, and Xie He from Michigan State University. Texas Instruments awarded cash prizes $10,000 for first place and $7,500 for second place.
During the 2012-13 school year, 47 accredited engineering colleges and universities from the U.S. and Canada participated in the TI Analog Design Contest, which attracted over 450 participants.
