For my Capstone, I wanted to apply all of the knowledge in various different engineering subjects topics I have gained throughout the entire course of the CTE Engineering program. I wanted to create a project that would demonstrate how anyone could create something for themselves while still being environmentally conscious and economically feasible just by learning engineering skills. I wanted to demonstrate this process by going through all of the steps of theoretically building a tiny house. My deliverable is essentially a “how to” guide on all of the different aspects and components to building a tiny house. This project is geared towards educating people on not just how they can build a tiny house but how they can take this process apply it to almost anything in their life. The goal of this project is for someone with little to no construction experience to follow this guide and actually build anything they wanted. This process of gathering the right materials and constructing by yourself could be for something as small as a birdhouse to something as significant as your own home. In order to complete this project I had to do thorough research on the process of construction a house, how to apply that into process to work in tiny house, and also how to gather so many essential materials that fall under the criteria.

For my Capstone, I 3-D printed a Zen Garden Tray for children who had symptoms of anxiety or showed signs of inattentiveness and impulsivity. since I also wanted to incorporate Psychology and Engineering into my Capstone, I designed my Tray to appeal to 1 of the 5 senses. by appealing to 1 of the 5 senses, my design would teach children how to be calm and mindful.

It would also teach children a grounding technique, and possibly inspire them to do something Engineering-related. on the back of each design would be instructions, showing step-by-step instructions on how to design the product.

For my capstone, I wanted to use the skills I learned in CTE Engineering to make the new building feel more like home. One of the things that everybody misses the most from the old building is all the unique spots spread out across the building where people would hang out. In the new building, a lot of that is missing because those spots haven’t been created yet, so I set out to make one. I decided that the best way for me to accomplish that would be to put some benches and wall art in place. For the location, I chose the 6th floor, outside of the Engineering and DigVid rooms. I chose that spot because it was important to me as an engineering student and because I noticed many people working in that hallway and sitting on the floor. Another important thing that I wanted for these benches was for them to be made out of recycled plastic material. Since the benches will most likely be there for a long time, I wanted them to be more than benches and have some kind of reminder built into them. Being made out of recycled plastic, they will stay as a reminder that SLA is a place that values sustainability and the environment. The finished product of my capstone is two park benches, made out of 100% recycled plastic material, and two pieces of art (both the work of SLA alumni), one for Engineering and one for Digivid.

Additional Pictures: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1JIS66rDFQCjH7vkKFI5-RAQHHF704_Rd/view?usp=sharing

Annotated Bibliography: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1njJbzGf63gV_ayiaeuWFfO6GXjrols5mPY2IncYrdcM/edit?usp=sharing

The initial plan for my capstone was to upcycle my dead laptop into useful stuff. My first planned device was a passively cooled desktop PC, which is what most of my research in my bibliography points to. I’d been attempting to get the mainboard of the laptop working for about 6 months until a repair attempt ended in the magic blue smoke (ie: the components fried). I then shifted to attempting to salvage still working parts from the laptop. The final product of this salvaging is a portable desktop monitor made from the LCD from the laptop. To do that. I started by buying some board from Shenzhen in order to convert an HDMI signal to LVDS for the monitor, then got to building an enclosure for the LCD out of sheet metal and 3d printed components. With one of the goals being portability, I reused the laptop’s hinges to make a folding stand for the monitor and found a power supply with similar dimensions to the board from Shenzhen, allowing everything to fold into a tight package.