The project has gone through several major changes during the third week of spring 2019 semester. The team has discussed three options with teacher advisors and our community partner, to successfully deliver results by the end of the semester. Unfortunately the scope of the project was much too large in attempting to create a drone swarm. Although simulations of one drone were successful we were like to get just that, only simulations as we did not have appropriate resources.

The team has decided to pivot and pursue a new concept. This concept involves adding spinning LED displays on the beams of our concept San Jose light tower. The spinning LEDs would implement persistence of vision lighting effects to add depth to the tower’s possibilities. During the 4th week our team will have to come up with a full design and semester plan for given addition to the project.

As the spring semester is winding up, this team has been forced to address the feasibility of our goals. Contingency concepts to address the wants of the San Jose Light Tower Corporation have been developed for this reason and we are currently weighing the potential options but will have clear updates on the project by next week. The team continues with graduating Mechanical Engineering students Sun Garcia and Christopher Kennedy with the addition of two more students to help finish this project.

Alexandra Krutekova is joining the team for Spring 2019 semester as a CMPE 160 student. Alexandra is Computer engineering student at SJSU starting her senior year. She would like to learn more about drones and their functionality, while applying already learned skills. Her specialty is programming in C++, Swift and digital design.

Daniel Soto is also joining the team for the upcoming semester.  Daniel is a senior majoring in Computer Engineering at SJSU. He has extensive experience working in IT with a solid understanding of programming.  He is looking forward to learning more about the ongoing drone project.

Update 11/25/18:

As of yesterday, we were able to connect the drone to our laptop and communicate with it. We were also successful on connecting it to Simulink and rendering some flight simulations of the drone. We were able to use flight log data recorded as text to identify errors while testing which will help in documentation and troubleshooting moving forward. We plan on flying the drone using the simulation code that we are producing. Although, we ran into a small problem, the video functions of the drones need to be debugged and reconfigured to our specific tasks that we are asking the drone to perform. We estimate that we will solve this by this week and hopefully have some flights recorded.  

Team Spotlight:

Nabil Shaheen is a senior Computer Engineering student graduating in Fall 2019. Nabil’s position is a researcher and team member. Nabil grew up in Jerusalem, then moved back to california at age of 16. His love for technology and science have pushed him to Major in Computer engineering. His passion developed over years of experience in the tech industry. He started out working at Best buy- geek squad, becoming team lead very quickly. After working in various different tech positions from tech support to network technician. it was time to go back to school and finish an engineering degree. On top of being tech savvy and having superior technical skills, his Soft skills such as presenting and conveying ideas are well developed. He believes that a well rounded knowledgeable engineer can change the world. His dream is to be able to benefit as many people as he can through innovation and collaboration with other engineers around the world. EPICS is a good cause university course that exposes student/engineers to working with their communities and members that wouldn’t have a chance of collaborating. After graduation, he plans on working for a biomedical company in mountain view and eventually opening his own engineering firm.

11-11 Update:

As the semester progresses the feasibility of the project in both technical needs and regulations that must be designed for. Currently the team is focused on identifying how the level of feasibility should be dealt with moving forward. Contingency ideas are in place if the team needs to adjust the technical approach to our community partner’s social problem. The goal to bring a concept to the San Jose Light Tower Corporation can take different forms and we may need to reassess the best possible way to achieve that goal. With the timeline needed to finish the project by next semester and have a prototype of sorts in December, this decision will need to be made in the coming days and then we will be diligently working to meet this timeline.

Team Member Spotlight:

Christopher Kennedy is a senior mechanical engineering student graduating in May. He is the project manager and also contributes to the power train team of Spartan Hyperloop. He grew up In Tracy, CA and attended Delta College in Stockton, CA prior to transferring to SJSU in 2017. While at Delta College he was a member of the Water Polo and Swimming Team although now he focuses mainly on school and Spartan Hyperloop. Christopher joined EPICS as a Junior in Spring 2018 and continued with the program for his senior project after enjoying work with the community partner and social concepts taught that are important to engineering work.

Update 10/28/18:

This past Friday, October 25th, we presented to the design review committee and fellow students in the basement of the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Library. Our team received both positive and negative feedback, but all were constructive moving forward. For one, as a team we need to be more clear and precise about what we are trying to develop and implement. The team received many reminders from advisers that this drone project is difficult relative to the other groups in the class. Thus, we will be keeping our goals modest, as to not undershoot our goals by a long shot!  We appreciate everyone who came out for food and a concept pitches to help the community of San Jose.

Team Spotlight:

Douglas James is a computer engineering major graduating in Fall 2019 and is a researcher on the team. Doug has a history researching the tech market online, especially for special projects such as a drone light show. He grew up in El Dorado Hills, CA where he built a smartphone repair business called iHealPhones when the iPhone just hit the market; business was hot! Doug is now building his next business, Minute.tech, which is an application to provide on-demand and reliable tech support to end-users. Doug joined EPICS to continue to build up his project development skills such as pitching, researching, and building ideas; he loves the class!