Matthew Lee Kane, the sole member of the the winning Spark Challenge team, Project Discovery, presents his team's work which is modeled after the Space Shuttle Discovery.

Roughly four dozen teams showcased projects they worked on for the last several months at the Spring 2023 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).

Project Discovery

First place went to Project Discovery. It is a small-scale electric vehicle project modeled after NASA’s Space Shuttle Discovery. It is designed to autonomously orient and deploy a camera system to receive radio commands. This occurs after the launch vehicle has landed.

Matthew Lee Kane was the sole member of the Project Discovery team.

Team PSP-L

Team PSP-SL finished in second place. The PSP SL Payload is designed to autonomously orient and deploy a camera system to receive radio commands. This occurs after our launch vehicle has lande

PSP-SL team members include Alexander Loney (team lead), Felipe Sandoval, Nicholas Williams, and Gabe Kurfman.

Instrument Practice Aid 

There was a three-way tie for third place between Instrument Practice Aid, Boxfish, and Engineers Chess.

Instrument Practice Aid is a music feedback system that is capable of giving feedback on the user’s performance on their monophonic instrument. The user can import music to the system or use pre-existing songs stored on the system.

Ryan Rask was the team lead. Other members were Manasi Rajan (software engineer), Andy Lin (systems engineer), and Runlang Hao (hardware engineer).

Boxfish

Boxfish is a reconfigurable dynamic lighting device designed to contribute to the decoration scheme of both home and professional environments.  Users will be able to input their desired display behavior in an app which will then update the pattern displayed by the Boxfish’s LED grid displays.

The team lead for Boxfish was Jonathon Snyder. Zachary Breisch was the hardware engineer, Agrim Bharat was the software engineer, and Luke Diehm was the systems engineer.

Engineers Chess

Engineers Chess is a voice-activated chessboard that allows two people to play a complete game using only their voices to control the pieces. There are multiple options to dictate the flow of the game, such as undo and reset buttons and a timer.

Engineers Chess includes Jack Gardel (team lead), Tyson Kline (system engineer), Bazim Azeem (software engineer), and Andy Helton (hardware engineer).

The winning team took home $2,000, second place won $1,600, and third place teams 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.