Senior Design Team 11, May 2018 • Radio Frequency Readout Device

The purpose of this project is to address the time-consuming act of checking each nut for secured tightness on anchor bolts of large lamp posts. Currently, each nut must be manually checked on each post for tightness to prevent a failure in the structure. This process takes a lot of time and cost to check each nut.

To address this problem, this project will design a prototype Radio Frequency Readout Device (RFRD) to read if each nut is tight or needs to be torqued properly. The RFRD will be reading the capacitance from the anchor bolt system. We will use this measurement to determine if the anchor nut is loose or tight.

The RFRD will then indicate the tightness of the anchor nut by sending a visual indication to the user.