Senior CAPSTONE - TERRA VISIOn

As part of the PLTW program at my high school, I worked on a capstone project throughout my senior year. It was a culmination of the work and processes I had learned through previous years in the program— the engineering design process, programming, teamwork and collaboration, effective communication skills, and much more.

With two of my fellow classmates, we collaborated to develop a cost-effective, accurate, and non-intrusive system to determine calls in line sports, such as volleyball, tennis, pickleball, etc. We spent a substantial amount of time first researching various solutions already on the market, as well as patent designs and possible drawbacks. The next step was to bring our ideas to fruition and develop our own solution, with multiple setbacks and redesigns to refine our product. We had received feedback from various teachers and even a panel of engineers from Lockheed Martin. After creating a working prototype, our final step was to prepare a presentation to pitch our product to a larger audience.

My main role in the project was the electronics and software components of the project, while my collaborators worked on the design and marketing. The final prototype of our product involved a dual-camera system (which could be expanded), which used object tracking and detection to judge calls. It would then give feedback to the end-user through LEDs and other stimuli. This project required the combination of various tech stacks and hardware components. The feedback system was driven by a Raspberry PI, which was wirelessly communicating with a laptop running the vision processing system through an SSH protocol.

Research and Design

For the initial stages of our capstone project, we first had to determine the problem we would spend the rest of the year trying to solve. Through surveys, personal interests, and peer feedback, we chose to create a cost-affordable solution to line calls. We then spent a great deal of time researching pre-existing solutions on the market, and evaluated how we could improve on those products.

PROTOTYPING AND REDESIGNS

Throughout this phase of the design process, our product went through multiple design iterations and changes as we discovered new issues and more efficient ways to tackle problems. During this phase we had also had a critical design review with various engineers, where we received valuable feedback on the direction of our product.

COMMUNICATING RESULTS

Our final task was to present our product on stage which was the culmination of our research, design, and prototyping to a wider audience. Our entire year’s worth of work had to be condensed into a 20 minute presentation, where we showcased the entire design process, from the researching phase to prototyping and setbacks, as well as a working prototype.

Tech Stack / Software Used