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.

I always wanted to make my Capstone involved in something that brought me joy whilst still having the aspect of challenging my engineering skills. Prior to this school year, I wanted to physically build my own pool table in order to give regular consumers a cheaper option and make the game easier to get into. Given the restrictions of online school, I wasn’t sure how I would bring my idea to life until my CTE-Engineering class began to practice and delve deeper into a CAD software called Fusion 360, where I realized I could digitally plan and design the table at home. Designing a cheap DIY build involved looking at online examples people have made in the past, finding which materials are necessary and which can be cut out, and researching the universal measurements used in pool tables (height, pool ball dimensions, pocket sizes, etc.) in order to make this project a legitimate table one could practice with and use. I had to go through a few iterations with the design before I achieved the right balance between cost-effectiveness and stiffness, which was accomplished after I conducted a static stress simulation on Fusion 360. This capstone was wrapped up and put together in an interactive website where one could easily read and follow how to make the design. Along the way, I learned that pool tables are not just desks with holes; their prices depend on the quality of parts used, their level of craftsmanship, and many structural intricacies.

Website: https://shark-chimes-4kn6.squarespace.com/

CAD: https://myhub.autodesk360.com/ue2ccdb80/g/shares/SH56a43QTfd62c1cd968f83d2024e3c0f01f

Annotated Bibliography: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1GyZqh7YynaL_75F0jTGIbS6e9amO3UmrxOyzkA8x1yY/edit

Towards the end of last year, the spotted lanternfly—an invasive species from southeast Asia that arrived in Pennsylvania in 2014—made its presence across Philadelphia, posing serious threats to the environment. Driven by the conversation of our environment, I aimed to create a product that would effectively assist or make progress in eliminating spotted lanternflies. I ended up reaching out to a Drexel professor from a Scientific American article, Antonios Kontsos, who was performing a research project designed to create an image-processing algorithm to detect spotted lanternfly egg masses. He responded and kindly invited me to attend one of the research team’s meetings where I familiarized myself with the group and was able to find my role in the hardware team. The research project split off into two teams: the hardware team captured images/samples of lanternfly egg masses or tested IR technology, and the software team worked on developing/testing processing algorithms to see which software was best. With that, our research teams ended up creating individual digital notebooks to document our progress so that future students/researchers could refer back to them when conducting new research.

Digital Notebooks: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1EbUUjdtObp677hUbgRabkMEteuhnpL5Ll3rkfFHrCjI/edit?usp=sharing

Annotated Bibliography: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1f0dDT8vKDNd0Ln7ybWHSuHx_DPFApH7-3lrPJQT64y0/edit?usp=sharing

Link to Annotated Bib. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1X7cjfjDYWKjycvTpudRMwB1QaFDnRhsg8v4tdU6ZfJ0/edit?usp=sharing