CHICO — For countless hours of her last semester in college, Amant Kaur has been working painstakingly on her drone prototype with the hope that it might one day make it to Mars.
“Ever since I was little, I’ve loved how vast and expansive space is and how much we don’t know about space,” Kaur said. “And how much NASA has done to be able to learn about space and be able to conduct missions like Voyager and New Horizons. Space missions have inspired me to learn more about engineering.”
Kaur’s drone, though still in the early stages, will eventually become a piece of technology that can be used remotely here on Earth and eventually beyond.
“So basically what this does is it allows scientists and engineers to control a drone system from the ground and have this drone system be remotely controlled in different areas,” Kaur said. “They’ll collect environmental data with a live camera such as temperature, data, humidity, light and it even has a gas sensor. So this will send live data from that drone sensor system back to a laptop through a web server for live updates.”
Dozens of Chico State seniors filled Colusa Hall with their demos, experiments and concepts for the future of engineering and technology on Friday as part of the school’s annual expo.
“This is the final recap of everything,” said Ghang-Ho Lee, adviser and professor of electrical and computer engineering. “So they are presenting their capstone design, which is a senior design that they’ve worked on for the last two semesters. It includes everything they’ve learned from freshman all the way to senior year.”
Like Kaur, many students had tangible prototypes they were showcasing. Billy Lim had created a robot designed for collecting physical waste such as litter. The ultimate goal, Lim said, was to have the robot be able to identify different types of waste. While still in the early stages, Lim showed that currently, the robot could determine the difference between pictures of animals. Upon showing it a picture of a golden retriever, the robot put its arms down as if to collect something off of the ground in front of it. A monitor hooked to the back of the robot allowed attendees to see what it saw.
“It has a pre-trained library and it’s supposed to be able to know how to detect cigarettes, plastic wrap aluminum, things like that,” Lim said. “I don’t have a library for that just yet so it’s mostly just a proof of concept.”
Music also played a large part in the expo. Neil Deniz created a machine that can automatically tune a guitar while Hector Ramirez created a music looping pedal that allowed loops to easily be uploaded to a computer and vice versa. Carson Culler created a computer program that would allow users to easily download tablature to their computer and be able to have it follow along with the player. Culler said he’s been learning guitar for the past couple of years and uses tabs when learning new songs.
“The problem is that a lot of websites that offer guitar tabs, if you want to automatically scroll, then it’s expensive,” Culler said. “Right now, there are only a few websites that offer that service so they know that you’re sort of forced to pay for it. So I wanted to just make a fun little project to sort of standardize this and allow you to download and automatically scroll guitar tabs for free, locally. And just as a little nod to computer science for my major, I made it a V.S. code extension.”
Sitting next to senior Dhiab Almansoori was a small remote-controlled car with sensors on all sides of it and a small camera attached to the roof. This was a much smaller version of what Almansoori has in mind for the long run.
“My project is a car security system,” Almansoori said. “It has two functions. If you get into a hit and run situation, the touch sensors around the car will detect any impact and there is a camera on top of the car that will rotate to wherever the crash took place and it takes a video. If it detects a face or a license plate, it will crop that image and send it to you within 30 seconds. There’s another function which is for if your license plate gets stolen, you will get an alert that someone is trying to take your license plate off.”
Next to Almansoori was Reann Howard who was demonstrating a portable heating and massage pad made for athletes or people with chronic pain.
“It has three temperature settings for the user that allows them to have a low, medium or high setting and it’s used for muscle cramps, menstrual cramps or any type of ache that the body has,” Howard said. “I also included a motor for massage features which also has three settings and it’s all displayed on an LCD screen.”
Howard said she wanted to create something that could help those dealing with cold weather conditions such as homeless people.
In that back corner of the room, multiple big-screen TVs were surrounded by a crowd of students. Each one was connected to a computer for seniors to showcase video games they created. Grant Stewart and Bryce Becerra worked on Sunshine RV, a play on words as the player takes the role of a moonshine brewer and sells it at a local trailer park. Sitting down and playing the game, the user grows their own materials and puts them together to create drinks for customers. When an order comes in, a timer comes with it and the player must put the drink together before the clock ticks down.
On the opposite end of the room, Lizzy Patridge had created a light-up snowman made of LED lights that flicker with different intensities based on the notes of the song played through it.
“My family is a really big Christmas family and we have a very similar decoration at home that really brings a lot of people out to view it,” Patridge said. “I think the electronics aspect of it is really interesting because I get to see the behind-the-scenes of setting it up. That’s why I wanted to try and build one myself.”
A crowd of Chico State college seniors, advisers, faculty and family members gathered at Colusa Hall on Friday, May 10, 2024 in Chico, California for the annual engineering and technology expo. (Jake Hutchison/Enterprise-Record)
+ There are no comments
Add yours