Team members from the top three teams gather in the Bill and Shirley Rice Design Studio.

Nearly two dozen teams showcased projects they worked on for the last several months at the Fall 2022 Spark Challenge. The event is a campus-wide, corporate-sponsored design competition, hosted by Purdue University’s Elmore Family School of Electrical and Computer Engineering in partnership with the ECE Student Society (ECESS). For the Fall 2022 event, nearly two dozen teams showcased the projects they had been working on all semester.

First place went to Team R.A.C.H.E.L., which created a table tennis setup with automatic score tracking and an added mode that challenges players to not hit the ball to the same place every time.

Team members included James Hubbard (Hardware Engineer), Micah Morefield (Systems Engineer), Jack Myers (Software Engineer), and Bartose Stoppel (Team Leader).

Team Swing Analysis finished in second place. The team developed a device that can be attached to a tennis racket to analyze three types of swings: forehand, backhand, and serve. The device connects to a mobile app which records metrics such as swing path, ball impact, and swing speed.

Team members included Ethan Crocker (Team Lead), Brayden McNamara, Kenzie Rappe, and Sean Boltjes.

In third place was Team Guitar Multi-FX Pedal, which designed a pedal for electric guitars that has a looper that allows a musician to layer tracks on top of each other, as well as control effects like distortion, reverb, and volume.

Team members were Han Tun Oo (Team Leader), John Ramthun, Michael Sciirocco, and David Nickel.

The winning team took home $2,000, second place won $1,600, and third place earned $1,200. Photos of the event are available here.

The Spark Challenge is held twice a year, at the end of the Fall and Spring semesters. The Spark Challenge is open to all undergraduate students in any discipline at Purdue University, and can be an individual entry or a team of up to four members.  It allows students to present their projects in one of two ways: demonstration only or demonstration and competition in the challenge which is judged by ECE faculty and corporate sponsors. Industry partners that helped judge and/or financially supported this semester's event include Milwaukee Tool, Sandia National Laboratories, Daimler Truck North America, Eastman, Intel, JLG Industries, Inc., Caterpillar Inc., Kirby Risk Corporation, NSWC Crane, SCALE, Eli Lilly, and the US Navy.