Capstone Project Wiki

(Submitted by email before the date listed in Learning Suite.)

Each team will submit a project description specific to your team that will be included in a year-end summary of projects that is distributed to industry professionals and Capstone potential sponsors. This booklet is available on the Capstone website and shows off the work of students and demonstrates the breadth and depth of Capstone projects.

For your project description, please include the following:

• A brief background that gives context for the project, including pertinent information about your sponsor
• A description of the project objective WITHOUT reference to cost or deadlines (unless the cost is a significant deliverable for the project)
• A summary of how the team met the objectives
• WHY this project is beneficial to the sponsor, humankind, and/or the greater good for all beings

Project descriptions should be no more than 200 words and should convey your successes with the project.

Project descriptions should be well-written, coherent, and professional. Think of this as a resume item or LinkedIn description of your work to potential employers or grad school admissions officers.

The Project Description should be submitted by email to capstonereports@byu.edu with a subject line of Team XX Project Description, where XX is your team number. The project description should be attached as a Word document.

Here are a few examples of good Project Descriptions:

• There are regions in the far Northern Hemisphere where the lives of humans and polar bears intersect, sometimes surprisingly. The number of encounters has increased over time, leading to increased risk to human lives and increasing polar bear deaths. With funding from the World Wildlife Fund, BYU Plant and Wildlife Sciences challenged the team to create a radar-based polar bear detection system to limit these harmful interactions. The team designed a radar detection system and corresponding app that allows users to view the location of polar bears in their region, providing an early detection system that ensures both the safety of humans and polar bears.

• CSL Plasma is a subsidiary of CSL Behring, a global biotherapeutics company that develops plasma-derived medicine to treat a variety of serious and rare diseases. CSL Plasma operates one of the world's largest and most sophisticated plasma collection networks. During the plasma donation process, two bags of solution are used: anti-coagulant and saline. The inspection process for these solutions is heavily labor driven, expensive, and has significant variability in both inspection and defect identification. The team has designed and prototyped an automated inspection system for bags of anti-coagulant solution using various methods to detect a wide range of possible defects. The automated inspection system prototype gives CSL a working design that they can hand off to an automation vendor to refine and upscale to meet their production goals. A fully working automated inspection system will significantly decrease labor cost and inspection variability, and it will increase the throughput of inspected bags.

• Gold Family Farms grows various plant products for sale to garden centers, landscapers, and re-wholesalers across the US and Canada and outperforms competitors through extensive use of automation throughout their business. This automation results in consistently higher quality plants produced at a lower unit cost. One of their operations involves the transportation of plants from a conveyor belt to a flatbed trailer. This process is currently being performed manually by employees. The teams project was to develop an automated system that allows variously sized potted plants to be moved and loaded onto the flatbed trailer without the use of manual labor. The solution involves a series of conveyor belts that will transport and organize the pots as they are received from the previous station. Once the pots are correctly positioned on a final conveyor belt, an overhead gantry will push the pots from the conveyor belt onto their desired location on the flatbed trailer. This automated system will increase efficiency and eliminate the need for repetitive heavy lifting. This allows employees who previously conducted this task to be utilized in higher value activities throughout Gold Family Farms.

• L3Harris produces tactical radios, avionics and electronic systems, antennas, and wireless equipment for use in the government, defense, and commercial sectors. To test their equipment, they use commercial network testers that are expensive, bulky, and have a larger set of features than necessary for L3Harris. This Capstone team created a cheaper, smaller, and more portable network traffic generator and analyzer to supplement L3Harris's commercial test equipment. Having a portable, inexpensive network testing solution allows L3Harris to perform more targeted network testing in a shorter amount of time. Designing the tool for an FPGA also makes it much easier to send and use in distant locations.

• Neff Aeronautics has teamed up with the Air Force Research Laboratory to develop a novel fuel system concept for potentially powering an airship. The challenge with airships is controlling the amount of lift and minimizing the weight of fuel needed to power a traditional energy system. The question that catapulted this research project is: “Is there a lightweight, alternative fuel system that is more efficient and capable of providing an airship with perpetual energy without having to land?” The team'ss challenge was to explore this question by designing, constructing, and testing a novel, hydrogen-based fuel system testbed and understanding the constraining factors. The system collects water vapor from ambient air, separates it into hydrogen and oxygen gas by electrolysis, and stores the hydrogen safely and efficiently which is then passed through a hydrogen fuel cell to generate electricity. This project benefits Neff Aeronautics by providing the foundational proof-of-concept necessary for them to invest the time and effort into manufacturing a large-scale hydrogen fuel system that could be tested on a real airship.

• Sandia National Laboratories, the nation's premier science and engineering laboratory for national security and technology innovation, created HALucinator, a generic CPU emulator, to remove the hardware dependency of firmware security research. This allows device security researchers to work faster and at a larger scale than ever before. With HALucinator, firmware can be thoroughly evaluated for security weaknesses without requiring the presence of a physical device. HALucinator currently supports several classes of devices, however it does not support firmware compiled for a real-time operating system (RTOS). The Capstone team produced a solution that adds support for the Zephyr RTOS to HALucinator's existing capabilities.