INNOVATION DAY 2023 | electrical engineering

Students: Ryan Gill, Ethan Hincapie, Dan Liu, Toven Tungul

AMBi is a portable listening module and a paired phone application. A sound library will be loaded onto the listening module. Whenever a sound in this library is heard by the module, it will send a notification to the user via the paired app.

Students: Danny Anaya, Jazeel Garibay, Kody Kirby, Emily Hernandez Medina, Timothy Rezek

Guidance Glasses are intended to be a wearable device that detects obstacles in front of the user at eye-level. The project will be capable of detecting obstacles up to 3 meters away and alert the user by providing both audio and haptic feedback.

Students: Mike Chavez, Zach Draxton, Tim Miller

The project involves minimizing space needed for a welder by providing a means of welding from a vehicle’s alternator.

Students: Sydney LaCost, Caleb Lindner, Liam O’Brien, Nathaniel Woods

VR Haptic Feedback Gloves sets out to solve two issues. Current VR controllers have limited feedback on what occurs in the VR space, if any. Our goal is to use magnetic breaking to provide haptic feedback to stop your fingers from phasing through objects. Current VR controllers are cost-prohibitive, costing hundreds of dollars for what should be a better experience. To solve this, we will use flex sensors in conjunction with hall effect sensors to keep costs down. Those two, combined, will provide a better experience to the end user, while also not destroying their pockets for a subpar experience.

Students: Noah Calvert, Jesus Cota Felix, Justin Lu, Matrix Rysewyk

The goal of this project is to create a battery-charging IC (integrated circuit) that allows the user to manually control the charging speed and charge capacity of the lithium-ion battery inside of their cell phone. Additionally, the IC will utilize an RTC (real-time clock), which, when interfaced with our design, will allow the user to set a time in the future for when they want their phone to prevent overcharging. We created this IC as a solution for minimizing E-waste contribution from lithium-ion batteries. Lithium-ion batteries have a lifespan of 3-5 years but can be extended or shortened based on the user’s charging habits. Leaving a phone on a charger while at 100% will, over time, result in dendrite plating on the lithium anode (the negatively-charge electrode from which current is supplied) of the battery. This permanently reduces charge capacity and slowly damages the phone itself due to prolonged, excess heating. In addition to reduced charge capacity, dendrite growth also increases the chance of an internal short-circuit. By controlling the charging speed and charge capacity of a lithium-ion cell phone battery, we expect the battery’s lifespan to increase.

Students: Dean Giammona, Britanny Guzman, Tyler Meroth, Zaneta Morales

The project is a square foot garden which will record various parameters of the crop planted in the garden. The sensors used to record the parameters compare will the current values to stored parameters to ensure optimal crop health. If the parameters do not match, the garden will send a notification to the user’s phone, prompting them to take corrective action so the crop may grow under optimal conditions. The garden records soil moisture and Nitrogen, Phosphorus and Potassium (NPK) values of the crop. The garden is powered by an Arduino mega with an onboard ESP8266 serial communication chip. The optimal crop values are stored locally on an Secure Digital (SD) card and are loaded onto the Arduino based on the user’s selection of crop.

Students: Jarrod Burke, Connor Jordan, Disha Patel, Andrew Thompson

This project involves a dashboard camera and microcontroller to track and monitor a driver’s gaze. An alarm will sound if the driver is detected to close their eyes, to prevent drowsy and distracted driving.

Students: Marco Habana, Christoph Kemmelmeier, Adam Mesa, Esham Mahmud

The SmartSole is a device that monitors a user’s standing posture based on the weight distribution and pressure profile found at the bottom of their feet. The device is comprised of a physical sensor and software feedback system that delivers real-time and intuitive results.

Students: Erik Hartman, Jason Jackson, Cooper Sargent, Jace Wheeler

The Footcandle Map Tracker (FMT) is a device designed to measure and map light levels in various outdoor environments. The FMT consists of a lux meter, GPS module and a microcontroller, which work together to capture footcandles on the site and assign locations to them. The FMT is designed to provide detailed information about light levels on a site, allowing users to identify areas of low or high light levels and make adjustments to improve the overall lighting conditions. The FMT is an innovative tool that can help improve the safety of various exterior sites including places of high traffic like, schools, hospitals, etc.

Students: Mattew Julio, Shane Grover, Preston Kowalski, Gage Stone

This project involves testing a rechargeable lithium-ion battery for remaining life and predicting replacement time by measuring the charged capacity of the battery through battery charging and discharging cycles. This offers predictions of when a battery will fail and will need to be replaced.

Students: James Beyer, John Boger, Al Francisco De Vera, Riley Lehman

The purpose of this product is to create a device that will assist the average person in becoming more aware of the soil they are using when growing a plant, as a way to promote plant health. Our device will increase the chances of plant prosperity by providing information to the user that would otherwise be unknown. The defining feature that separates our device from other products is a smartphone interface and plant database that compares sensor information to known requirements for individual plants.

External advisors: Sean Geffert, Mike Hennen and Chris Reilly of Tesla

Students: Abby Dolan, Chris Livingston, Jack Nish, Cole Schaefer

Our team is producing a portable power cart capable of serving industrial loads. Our battery inverters are provided to us through our partnership with Tesla. This cart can output 120 volts, 208 volts and 240 volts to power many different industrial tools and equipment. The internal electrical design was made by us and the physical design of the cart was made by a capstone group from the Mechanical Engineering department. With this solution, a customer can roll the cart on-site and use it to power multiple tools simultaneously with no need for exhaust considerations or expensive temporary power feeds, which are a must when dealing with a petroleum-powered generator.

Students: Zachary Cook, Gregory Engler, Leo Henson, Ian Uelman

Our group is creating a Computerized Numerical Control Machine with only two linear stage rails networks that will be capable of movement in the X-, Y- and Z-axis frames. The base assembly (X-axis movement) will be controlled by sets of servo motors allocating torques to wheels to move up and down a sheet of wood with precision, cutting and marking it. This, along with theoretically compressible linear stage rail systems which fall outside of the scope of our project solution, will make the machine compressible, lightweight and portable and, consequently, capable of being carried around on a construction/artisanal jobsite to automate certain worker tasks that would hitherto be considered “menial” and “grueling.” The CNC Machine will come with certain presets and prompts, asking the user how they want to cut or mark a given wooden slab, but it also will come with the ability to carve slightly more complex designs (e.g., square or star shapes) and receive G/M code uploads from the user that describe designs not coded for within our invention.

Students: Gabrielle King, John McMillan, Matt Pendleton, Clifford Stewart

This project involves a SMART Table that is built upon the logic of having modules that no other tables currently have. The modules are a heating element, a Lazy Susan, a speaker system and LEDs.

Students: Robert Armstrong, Brody Ehlert, Dillon Seward, Joe Telleria

Neural Networks for Filtering of Multiple Simultaneous Speakers

A filter is designed using a neural network to filter out a single speaker from an input audio file consisting of multiple speakers with noise. This project is made for the purpose of using smart devices or other voice-activated technologies where the coherency of one speaker is necessary in situations where other speakers and noise may be present.