Outdated, but still useful!

Your request for memories of senior projects prompted me to open the reports I wrote for the EE 496 and EE 497 courses in the fall of 1980 and spring of 1981. It may come as a surprise to some of you that I still have these reports on my bookshelf but I've always saved them as a reminder of CSU and my experiences in the Department of Electrical Engineering.

My project, titled Color Graphics Display of Interactive Fourier Transform, would sound to most students today to be a 5 minute homework assignment using MATLAB on a personal computer; however, in 1980 the only color display available to a CSU EE student was attached to the computers used to study atmospheric (cloud) data in research being conducted for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. In addition, my project preceded by a few years the wide availability of Personal Computers and was done at a time when the accepted language for engineering programs was Fortran.

Dr. Thomas Brubaker, my advisor, wanted a teaching tool that he could use to illustrate how the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) transformed digitally sampled signals into a frequency spectrum. In addition, he wanted a tool to illustrate the frequency spectrums of common signals like square waves and triangle waves in an interactive environment for his students.

In order to document the project, I spent one late night in the computer lab with a camera and slide film in order to capture images of the displays for my final presentation. Today, the captured images would be imported to PowerPoint; capabilities and applications that didn't exist at the time.

As I said earlier, the program and subroutines I wrote for this project seem simple today in a world of MATLAB and personal computers; however, the insight I received from this project served me well in a career performing acoustic signal processing and analysis for the US Navy.