For my Capstone, I wanted to use my Arduino skills and knowledge of electrical engineering to create a quadcopter/drone and give it away to some charitable organization. My path, however, was riddled with many roadblocks, I tried reaching out to various toy donation organizations and asked if I would be able to give this project away, and sadly most were not currently accepting any toy donations due to the COVID-19 public health crisis and because of the chance of it becoming a fire hazard. When all hope seemed lost, I found an organization willing to help my cause, the National Public Safety Drone Donation Program, this organization creates and accepts donations for drones that can be used by mainly firefighters and different fire departments to save lives. They told me they would willing to take my drone and I also left a cash donation for their cause. My final product for my Senior Capstone is the images of the steps I took to make my drone/quadcopter and the receipt of my donation to the National Public Safety Drone Donation Program. I hope my donation and project can be used to help fire departments save a family or someone who is in harm’s way.

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