CS 481 Group Design Project

Fall 2004 Projects

Last Updated December 02, 2004

Project Title: Automatic Digitizing of Weather Charts

Team 28 Developers:  Pat Ambrose, Arash Dehghan, Adam Lowry, Layne Lund, Kevin Schafer

Weekly Team Meeting:  Thursday 12:00 - 1:30 PM Pacific in JEB 324

Description:  This project entails developing an application that scans pen recorder weather charts and the digitizes the trace on the chart. An example is chartScan.jpg on the web site http://www.uidaho.edu/~myron/Images.  If you do a google with "digitizing charts" you find numerous programs and explanations as to how it is done. This tends to be a very individual matter which explains why there are so many programs. Finding the properties of an individual pixel is almost a trivial exercise. It is what to do with it after the properties of interest are obtained that makes this interesting.  The application must accurately and reliably extract the temperatures from the trace on the chart.  The lower trace of humidity is ignored. We also have many charts showing barometric pressure and precipitation that we also want to be able to digitize. We have lots of charts and would want this program to be as generic as possible.  A possible approach is to simply (??) get the x-y values of the trace (corrected for skew and so forth) and then pull off values in degrees Celsius or pressure in millibars or precipitation in mm.  None of these tasks are really trivial, and to complicate matters more, the traces are not all as nice as the one in this example.  Here's were accurate and reliable identification of the trace becomes important.

Project Title: Smart Comment Stripper

Team 29 Developers: Justin Boggs, Jesse Gonzalez, Ryan Hanlon, Bryan Kirkendall, Jeff Sager

Weekly Team Meeting:  Tuesday 8:30 - 10:00 AM Pacific in JEB 324

Description: All of the turmoil tools we use today rely on a lower-level tool -- 'cstrip' -- to strip comments.  'cstrip' is a very simple C program built around lex/yacc.  The issue we're facing with this tool is two-fold.  First and foremost, 'cstrip' only removes C- and C++-style comments.  When given a shell or Perl script, for example, the tool knows nothing about shell-style comments and therefore fails to strip anything, or strips stuff that shouldn't be stripped.  The resulting turmoil reports for files other than C/C++ code are often wildly incorrect.  Second, there are some known issues with the tool, I suspect with the lex/yacc conversion to C, that cause the tool to incorrectly strip C/C++ comments.  It remains my hope we can solve these issues with a more robust comment stripper.

We are looking for a "smart" comment stripper, one that dynamically determines the type of file it is parsing then adjust itself to strip the appropriate comment set.

Finally, it is important to note this is a production tool.  Quality of the solution is paramount.

Project Title: Distributed Optical Ray Tracer

Team 30 Developers: Ann Booth, Kevin Henry, Fred Mosby, Brad Mues, Adam Phillabaum

Weekly Team Meeting:  12:30 - 2:00 PM Pacific in JEB 324

Description:  The Multiple Machine Implementation of the Optical Ray Tracer (ORT) continues development on the Optical Ray Tracing project that was initially created by Team 23 in Fall 2003 and re-implemented and extended by Team 27 in Spring 2004. The MAT project has succeeded in making a simulation tool for modeling combinations of optical components.  Team 27 added a Graphical User Interface (GUI) that makes setting up new optical simulations easier, and added new simulation components.

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