Saline Drive Unit

Supervised the hardware design and did the firmware development for a saline drive medical device. This unit put out high-pressure pulses of saline fluid from a coaxial catheter for use in emergency treatment to bust up a coronary blood clot that is causing a heart attack. It included a vacuum source to suction up the debris. Firmware was implemented on an 8-bit PIC microcontroller. It monitored both pressure and vacuum for proper operating range. The pressure was determined indirectly by monitoring the current waveform of the pump motor and applying simple DSP algorithms.