Jennifer Liem was born and raised on the island of Oahu. A 2004 graduate of Campbell High School, she is currently pursuing a bachelorā€™s degree in electrical engineering at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. In her scarce leisure time, she enjoys being around her friends, solving puzzles, reading, and practicing her creative writing skills.

Home Island:Ā Oahu
High School:Ā Campbell High School
InstitutionĀ when accepted: University of Hawaii at Manoa

Akamai Project:Ā Video Control Switch GUI
ProjectĀ Site:Ā Textron
Mentors:Ā Randy Goebbert, Ross Matoi, Nathan Kimura

Project Abstract:

Currently at NAVSEAā€™s SHOTS (Stabilized High Accuracy Optical Tracking System) Telescope, routing of data is done by physically cabling together the devices that gather the data to those that output or store it. Rewiring dozens of cables every time someone wishes to reroute the data is very inefficient. In addition, redirecting data to several output devices requires a signal splitter, which degrades the quality of the signal. The solution is to add a video control switch onto the network to reroute the data signals. The goal of this project was to implement this solution by placing the device onto a network, connecting it to a serial device server, connecting the server to a switch, and creating a graphical user interface (GUI) to allow a user to instantly and easily connect the numerous media inputs and outputs. Due to its widespread familiarity and platform-independence, Tool Command Language and its toolkit, Tcl/Tk, was the programming language chosen to build the GUI in a UNIX environment. For simplicity, the GUI design consists of just a pull-down menu for each of the 16 output connections, and a button that allows the user to save the current configuration to a file. For real-time results on the connection status and to allow the user complete control of the video control switch, the program queries the device every second and sends out corrections if an error is found. After overcoming obstacles such as broken cables, and modifying the GUI to accurately receive data over the UDP protocol, the GUI was used to communicate with the video control switch using an intermediate serial device server. However, the system still from suffers hardware problems that will be addressed in future work.