Six Teams of Talented ECE Students Win Places in the ECE Senior Design Project Competition
Content
In this year’s Senior Design Project competition, held annually as the culminating event in the capstone course of the Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) Department, six innovative and eye-catching projects attracted the attention of the judges and the audience. The three teams that placed as the “Faculty Choice Winners” were: first place, The Wall (Team 30); second place, Bored?Board (Team 11); third place, Smoking D.A.R.T.S (Team 25). There were also three teams chosen by the audience as “People’s Choice Winners.” CRUISE – HVAC Diagnostic Bot (Team 2) took first place, while second place went to IntelliTank (Team 9), and third place was taken by Convo-Sense (Team 6).
As part of the ECE capstone course, all seniors work in teams of four students on year-long projects, in which each team designs and prototypes a system of its choice. Each team is advised by a faculty member in the ECE department, and projects undergo four formal reviews. The learning goals for the Senior Design Project include technical design, teamwork, presentation skills, and an understanding of realistic constraints, which are all evaluated by judges in this end-of-year competition.
All the winning teams featured innovative and useful designs. The first-place Faculty Choice Winner was The Wall, a team made up of Alexander Korniyenko, Luke Lacasse, Jonah “Jay” Yolles-Murphy, and Yanbin “Ben” Wu. The Wall addresses the persistent problem of the difficulty and time it takes to find inventory, such as electronic parts on a “parts wall.” To solve this problem, The Wall provides user-search features for locating components, and the system supplies information on usage data while also illuminating the bin corresponding to each electronic component selected on the Web-interface.
Second-place finisher Bored?Board is a physical game board with technology integration to offer the immersive experience of board games. “To do this,” as the team members explain, “we introduce Bored?Board with two primary games, Gomoku and Go, which have PvP and PvC with our artificial-intelligence physical feedbacks at the same time.” The team members are Chengwen Sun, Yan Chen, Jianyuan Wu, and Xu Huang.
The third-place team, Smoking D.A.R.T.S, is made up of Kai Dyer, Zach Kashef, Cassandra Penttila, Alon Trogan, and Kyle Taubert. Smoking D.A.R.T.S aims to bring players together by creating an affordable system that enables two people to play darts distantly without using the same board in the same place. As team members explain, “Using camera sensors and piezo sensors, the Smoking D.A.R.T.S system will be able to detect where a dart is located on the board and automatically update the score for both players through an app.”
The three teams that placed as the People’s Choice Winners were just as innovative as the three Faculty Choice Winners. First-place finisher CRUISE – HVAC Diagnostic Bot attempts to solve the problem of the limited accessibility of HVAC ventilation shafts due to several persistent factors. “Our project aims to solve some of these problems by creating…a fully autonomous bot capable of gathering accurate diagnostic data from inaccessible places and mapping the traversed HVAC ducts,” say the four team members. They are Rupak Poddar, Vihar Vasavada, Liam Glockner, and Siddhanth Ghosh.
The four team members forming second-place finisher IntelliTank are Thomas Horner, Rohan Singhvi, Owen Iheron, and Sach Jankharia. As they say about their project, “IntelliTank will allow fish owners to easily monitor the status of their tanks and feed their fish whenever and wherever they may be. Using real-time sensing mixed with analytics on stored data, IntelliTank aims to ease the duties of owning fish while still [allowing the owners] to enjoy the company of their pets.”
Third-place finisher Convo-Sense offers “an integrated solution for the ideas lost in conversation.” Team members Anthony Carneiro, Jessica Peters, Sohan Show, and David Price explain that “Convo-sense listens to conversation between two people and conducts offline analysis to find out relevant context and keywords of the conversation. This preserves user privacy and automates reference-searching and note-taking for the user.”
