Winner of Capstone Projects 2016

     Starting last year, my department has a new lab design for final year students. The project is based on groups. Each year the themes are different. This year the theme are about Electronic Device for Campus Security Enhancement, Digital Agriculture, Digital Home, Digital Healthcare and Public Safety. Beside the themes, students are encouraged to focus on developing their own sensors, or Internet of Things (IoT) applications.

     There were 20 groups competing in those categories. My students' group is in Digital Home. They built a system known as Automatic Planting System (APS). Although the system was developed for an agriculture system, it was not meant for a mass production system. It is customized for home used. The main idea is to optimized space utilization especially if one has a small space home.In addition, the system was supposed to automatically watering the plants based on the configured schedule. Thus, home users can let the plant been taken care even though they are busy working or traveling.

In the same category, the competitors are:

Well, actually two of the above projects are from Digital Agriculture groups. I just put them together to see how huge differences between my students' project and them.

The Digital Home winner project is as below:

 

Winners from other categories:

The overall winner is my student's group!

Overall, students able to achieve the product development specification. However, some of the products' features are not really convenient, practical, solving user's problem and not innovative enough. They can improve the products further if they can get sufficient feedback on time. But, based on the jurors feedback they can improve the products further on their own or if there is any interested party to do so.

The most important thing is students learn multi-discipline knowledge and skills to complete the project. Congratulation!