Educational Aquaponics display with the Tech Museum

The students will construct an aquaponics setup behind the visitor facing window of the Support Lab at the Tech Museum. The project is expected to serve both as a backend tool to grow plants for hands-on activities as well as provide a visually stunning display to promote the space. The smart aquaponics system would be integrated with sensors, cameras to convert a physical garden into a digital space that the visitors can engage with.

Community Partner: The Tech Museum

Smart Lockers 2.0 with the Gilroy Compassion Center and AtHack Inc

Smart Lockers are provided to clients of GCC for safe storage while they receive services, and AtHack is exploring installing outdoor lockers in public spaces for long-term storage. The main goal of this project is to improve on the initial design of the locker systems. Key areas where improvement would be carried out would be optimizing control panel/circuit space, improving the user interface with customization based on user feedback, improving the security of lockers, and creating an emergency backup power system. The lockers are extra-large for increased storage capacity where each locker is equipped with a keypad, LCD screen, power outlet, a short shelf, and hooks.

Community Partner: Gilroy Compassion Center, Athack Inc

Closed-loop system with the California Native Garden Foundation

A student team designing and building a closed-loop agriculture system with local community gardens.  The system will include a system that connect a rainwater catchment, irrigation, aquaponics, and biogas into a single system.  Currently, the California Native Garden Foundation has individual parts, however, they will need to be integrated together. There is also discussion of turning this project into a business plan, that will promote closed-loop urban agriculture systems

Community Partner: California Native Garden Foundation

Flying Drone array with the Tower Foundation

In this project, students will engineer dancing drones that would fly out at certain periods of the day to dance and then return to their docking stations to charge. In addition to excellent technical skills, this project also involves creatively organizing the dance for the array of drones.

Community Partner: San Jose Light Tower

Underwater Drone 3.0 with the South Bay Clean Creek Coalition

Project Pisces was started as an initiative in partnership with the South Bay Clean Creek Coalition (SBCCC) to reduce depletion of endangered fish species. It supports SBCCC’s mission in conducting research of the fish with little to no impact on wildlife in the Guadalupe River. Below are the two projects for next year:

a. Improvement in Image recognition: Improving on a previous prototype submitted during the 2017-2018 academic year, this project will be to differentiate the endangered species (Steelhead and Chinook) within themselves in addition to differentiating it from other fish species. A proposed idea is to also recognize adult phases of these fish along with the juvenile phases.
b. Steelhead Monitor Device: The goal of this project is to develop a device that would also monitor Steelhead that usually stays close to the riverbanks. The current prototype requires deeper sections of the stream so the students would need to redesign an underwater drone that can be in more shallow parts of the stream.

Community Partner: South Bay Clean Creeks Coalition

CNC machine with SJSU Makerspace

SJSU Makerspace is looking to get have student design and build a Computer Numeric Control (CNC) machine to be used in the Makerspace.

Community Partner: SJSU Makerspace