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.

To be an engineer is to be committed to expressing yourself unapologetically. That is what I believe. Last year, I was worried about what I wanted my capstone to focus on. I was thinking everything engineering, traditional engineering. However, after some meaningful class discussions with Mr. Ugworji, I concluded the best capstone would be something I would do in my own free time.

So I decided to focus my capstone around Fashion. Something I knew very little about when it comes to production and its direct relation to engineering.

After intensive research, I came across Virgil Abloh, a Mechanical Engineer, Founder of Off-White, and Creative Director of Louis Vuitton. Virgil helped me understand how I can use engineering concepts to aid my clothing designs.

I quickly realized that Virgil specializes in Deconstruction, an aesthetic that sheds more spotlight on the materials that make up the final product. Deconstruction is very similar to reconstruction, the aesthetic I emulate, directly influenced by my favorite designer house Sacai.

So why?

Well, we need more engineers in Fashion. Clothes production is one of the leading causes of the climate crisis. To produce one T-Shirt, it takes 40 gallons of water. So during the early stages of my capstone, I decided to work with second-hand clothing. I, alongside my brother, started a collective that focuses on using old materials and creating something new. This leads to a reconstruction aesthetic and a less polluted environment. Although I faced many difficulties while finishing this capstone(such as breaking my sewing machine three times and deciding to just hand stitch), I persevered, and I am glad to say I made something I am proud of.

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.

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