Join us in congratulating ECE undergraduates Mitchell, Matthew, Lam, Valentine, and Larry for their accomplishment in receiving one of this year’s Faculty Awards at the 2022 Capstone Design and Innovation Day! We were able to connect with the team to ask about their work together on the capstone team, their excitement about their chosen project, and some of the challenges they were able to overcome together!
Which company did you work with?
We worked with Airtame, a company that builds wireless screen sharing devices for school and business settings headquartered in Copenhagen, Denmark.
What would be the “elevator pitch” for your project (i.e., what is your innovation, what problem does it solve, etc.)?
Studies have shown that environmental conditions such as CO2, temperature and humidity exceeding certain thresholds can have a negative impact on the effective learning of students in classrooms. Our project lets the teacher know when the classroom conditions are becoming unfavourable to learning, and nudges them towards making changes to the classroom to help students learn more effectively.
What inspired you to pursue this particular project?
The project was well presented by the clients from the start of the project. This project also seemed like a good opportunity to work through and complete a proof of concept design from start to finish while involving multiple facets of electrical and computer engineering.
What was the biggest challenge you faced while working on your project?
The biggest challenge we faced was integrating our teams’ work together into one functioning unit. We split ourselves up into teams to satisfy hardware, firmware and user application requirements, and when it came time to consolidate our teams’ work into one working unit, we realized we had many slight inconsistencies to debug which took more time than we had anticipated.
What excited you the most about your project?
The experience of working with a group of bright and driven students in a simulated professional capacity!
What is the most interesting/surprising thing you learned while working on your project?
One surprising thing we learned throughout the project was just how much part availability can fluctuate. We would spend a considerable amount of time designing PCB revisions to a specific footprint for certain components, only to find months later when we wanted to make a second order that the part was no longer in stock and would not be for the foreseeable future. For this reason we selected several backup components that would satisfy the requirements of the project.