On Thursday April 15, the Brown School of Engineering hosted its annual Engineering Design Showcase, a poster session involving all of the capstone projects across the School. The ECE Department fielded 9 capstone teams at the event and brought home numerous awards.  This was the culmination of a highly successful year for Senior Design in the ECE Department.  We are already hard at work planning for next year’s course, which we expect to be even more successful.
Thank you to all the faculty who mentored ECE teams this year!

Some highlights of the event for ECE teams:

• Best Interdisciplinary Project -- 3D modeling turntable -- a project initiated by ECE senior Robert LiKamWa
• Best Gaming or Consumer Technology --  Bluefrared: Smartphones used as infrared remote controls
• Professors’ Choice -- Rice Video Trolley for Shriners Hospital
• Students’ Choice -- Independent Ground Vehicle Robot
• Grand Prize: the KBR Award Engineering for Design Excellence -- Rice Video Trolley
  

• ECE students participated in 12 capstone projects: 9 hosted by ECE, 2 by BioE, and one by MEMS
• Of the 9 ECE-hosted projects, 3 involved students from other departments
• All 3 of the ECE-hosted interdisciplinary teams won awards
• The 3D Modeling Turntable was the first project to have students from 3 departments: ECE, CAAM, and MEMS
  

• Of the 9 ECE teams, all but 1 made extensive use of the Design Kitchen (OEDK) resources (the one exception was a pure software project)
• Several of the ECE teams, including the Video Trolley, received most of their funding from the OEDK
  

 Interaction with industry

• 5 of the 9 ECE teams received support from industry

• 4 of the 9 teams had alumni mentors from National Instruments

 Other highlights

• The Rice Video Trolley team moved their entire setup, including a 24 foot long track mounted 7 feet off the floor, to the Rice Memorial Center for the demo

• Jokers and Gestures demonstrated their impressive technology for controlling PowerPoint slides using only gestures on an iPhone on the large screen in the RMC
•  The Bus Tracker team was the first (in 5 attempts) to deliver a working demonstration of a complete end-to-end tracking system. 
  

Below is a summary of the subject of all the ECE-hosted projects and the awards won.

Team Name	Members	Description	Awards
Trek Tracker	Jon Stanley (ECE); Laura Liem, Ashley Hill (MEMS)	Video trolley for gait analysis of patients at Shriners Hospital	Grand Prize (KBR Design Excellence Award) $5K; Professors’ Choice Award ($500).
6 Cents	Shamoor Anis, Frank Chen (ECE); Chris Ertel, Wally Kelm (MEMS)	Sensor platform for Rice’s entry in the Independent Ground Vehicle Robot competition	Students’ Choice Award ($500)
Supermodel	Robert LiKamWa (ECE); Ben Bahorich (MEMS); John Cate (CAAM)	Turntable-video system for extracting 3D models of objects	Best Interdisciplinary Project ($500)
Bluefrared	Kevin Choi, Lucia Sun, Jose Hernandez, Sam Kim (ECE	Device and software to allow remote control of stereo from smart phone (via Bluetooth)	Best Gaming or Consumer Technology ($500)
Rockbox	Kyle Barnhart, Seth O’Brien, Ricky Barrerra (ECE)	Studio quality  Guitar effects processor using high-end DSP
Bus People	Bailey Basile, Katherine Threlkeld, Alysha Jeans (ECE)	System for tracking and reporting location of Rice Shuttle
PING	Jash Guo, Nik Maureira, Joe Cavazos, Michael Lo (ECE)	Distributed network performance testing with centralized control & reporting
Jokers & Gestures	Jaimeet Gulati, Ryan Pei, Maxime Paul, Tate Hornbeck (ECE)	Control & enhancement of PowerPoint slide shows using gestures on smart phone
Teleaudio	Michael Foree, Chris Eagleson, Daniel Valvano (ECE)	Emergency audio receiver for DTV broadcasts