Welcome to the week of 10/25 blog post from team Electric Eye. This week we presented our PDR Presentation to our sponsor company, FPL! The team put lots of preparation into out presentation, and it was a great experience for all of us. In this blog post, we’ll share more of our experience from presenting our project and discuss a little bit about what’s next for the team.

The PDR Presentation

On Monday, the team had an opportunity to share the bulk our work that we’ve put into the project through this semester! We spent a large part of our last week preparing for the presentation, and we are happy to say that it went very well! We presented our PDR to our liaison and a few other important people to our project, and they gave us great feedback that we look to take with us into our next phase of our project. Our presentation was online, so while we were not able to meet in person, our presentation still went very smoothly. Presenting online takes away the chance for our team to meet with our liaison in-person, but we are excited for an opportunity to meet at the FPL headquarters whenever that time presents itself.

What’s Next For Team Electric Eye

Now that the we’ve completed our PDR Presentation and got approval to move forward with our project, what’s next for the team? We have all put a lot of effort into getting a design that we are in confident in, now comes the most exciting part, developing our project! For the rest of the semester, we’ve laid out a plan for the that has us developing our prototype and training our model to begin detecting hazards. This is the time for our team to utilize our engineering skills and build our project! We have Prototype Inspection Day to look forward to soon in the future, so we’ll be preparing our first prototypes for now. Then, we have our SLDR at the end of the semester.

Thank you for reading this week’s blog post from team Electric Eye, we have a lot of exciting developments coming soon, and we’ll be back next week!

Welcome to the Electric Eye blog post for the week of 10/17! This week we spent our time revising our concept and PDR for our presentation with FPL. Thanks to the help of our liaison, we’ve refined our design and have begun looking towards what is up next for our project. In our programs class time this week, we also had guest speakers Dr. Manuel Bermudez and Ian Baldwin deliver great lectures on the “Scrum Framework” and “Emotional Intelligence” respectively.

Final PDR Presentation

After getting some awesome feedback from our coach and the program director on our PDR report and presentation, we’ve been able to clean up our PDR to a point that fully reflects the work that has been put into the project to this point. With our upcoming presentation, we have spent some time practicing our parts together and feel very confident in what we have! Once our presentation is finished we can get to the fun part of building our device!

Guest Lectures

Our guest lecturers this week gave some useful information and insight into working within a team effectively. We had the choice of 3 lectures for the beginning of our presentation, and the team went to the “Scrum Framework” lecture with guest speaker Dr. Manuel Bermudez as we felt that it would be most beneficial to our team. While we were all familiar with the Scrum development process, Dr. Bermudez was able to answer questions that went a bit deeper then we had previously experienced. Our second guest lecturer, Ian Baldwin, discussed the importance of Emotional Intelligence in the workplace and how improving our own EQ will make us not only more hirable, but also increase our satisfaction in the workplace. We want to thank both of our guest speakers for their time!

Homecoming was this week, so our time together was shortened slightly, but its been a productive week nonetheless. Thanks for reading this week’s blog post from team Electric Eye!

Welcome to the Electric Eye week of 10/11 blog post! We presented our PDR this week during our typical lecture time. It was a great chance to get some experience presenting our project and to see other groups in action.

“This week, we had the opportunity to present our PDR to some of our peers. I found it very beneficial to get feedback from other students. Looking forward, I believe the advice we received will definitely improve the quality of our presentation.” – Sebastian Valdes, Team Leader

With the in-class presentation we gave and hurricane Milton, the team hasn’t had many opportunities to meet and further our project development, but next week we’ll be back at it. Until then, we’ll be working on polishing our presentation for our future presentations! Thank you for reading this week’s blog post from team Electric Eye!

Welcome to the Electric Eye team blog post for the week of October 4th! This week the team let ideas flow as we finish up our process of concept generation. Our discussion is centered around finding the best fit design for our customers, though we’ve allowed ourselves to leave that box a bit this week with some help from a guest speaker from this weeks lecture!

Generating The Right Idea

This week we had guest speaker Dr. Elif Akçalı discuss “Divergent Thinking” along with a workshop that had our team brainstorming in new ways. As Engineers, we often suppress our creativity in favor of the quick or easy solution rather then allowing ourselves to generate ideas! In our workshop, Dr. Akçalı emphasized to us the importance of generating ideas for the sake of generating ideas; we were given helpful exercises that expanded our range of thought and led us to some interesting, difficult and improbable, yet unique concepts. While much of what we came up with will quickly be moved to the side, there were ideas that are worth considering or that pushed the team into new spaces. An important thing to keep in mind through much of our concept generation will be choosing the concept that we are going to develop! Its easy to look at some of our ideas that involve cool technology to make our device, but often times the RIGHT idea is not the BEST idea. With that in mind, the team will continue working hard to make the best project! (Below is a white-board from one a recent brainstorming session!)

The Electric Eye team is working on building out our System’s Architecture, which is bringing much of our research and concept generation together! We don’t have too much longer until we present our Preliminary Design Review, we’ll continue polishing our design and refining our concept. Thanks for reading this week’s blog post from team Electric Eye!

Welcome to the week of 9/27 blog post for team Electric Eye! This week, the team has been building up our research library and began work on the first draft of our Preliminary Design. Also, this week was Career showcase at the University, and members of our team took time to make industry connections! Its been a busy week for us as we move closer to having our Preliminary Design completed.

Preliminary Design Report

The Preliminary Design Report (PDR) is the culmination of the work that we have put in to the project so far, and is a huge part of the first semester in IPPD. While we are all eager to begin building the project, having a solid ground to work on is extremely important! Understanding the full scope of our project requires deep context of the customer’s needs and the current research and technology that exists. This process is necessary to creating a robust design that will allow us to build a product that meets our sponsor’s requirements. The team has been looking into appropriate MLMs and techniques for creating our hazard detection system, along with researching the most effective method of detection for the needs of FPL. We also have been considering the design of our system’s apparatus and the materials that will be needed for it along with its power supply and method of notification. With much to consider, it’s important that we are thorough with our research to generate a great concept. Our PDR consists of a Literature Review and our concept generation, on top of our PDS that has already been completed!

Career Showcase

The University of Florida held their Career Showcase this week, a significant event that hosts many companies from different industries. While the Career Showcase is not connected to IPPD, this is an important time for everyone in the program. Having this opportunity to establish connections with recruiters in industry is extremely valuable, and members of our team took advantage of it! We are all grateful to have these chances prepare for our futures!

That’s all from us this week at Electric Eye, thank you for reading!

Welcome to the week of 9/20 blog post for team Electric Eye! This week we’ve began to dig deeper into the requirements and defining our specifications for our hazard detection system. The team has had an opportunity to meet with our liaison engineer at FPL and one of our stakeholders that will get direct usage of our device. Having these discussions has helped the team grow our confidence and better prepare ourselves to create a design that will fit what FPL needs! The team is ramping up with research and designing as we prepare for our Preliminary Design Review!

Team Electric Eye Logo

This week, we are unveiling our logo! After some feedback and revisions on our original design, and the great work from our own Brian Nielsen, we are happy to be able to show off our logo!

Our logo, much like our team name, takes inspiration from the goal of our project. The system we are looking to build will provide another layer of safety for FPL’s on-site workers, which is the inspiration for the shield that our lightning bolt and eye sit on. Again, the team would like to thank Brian for the hard work he put in to designing our logo!

That’s all we have for you this week! The team is preparing themselves for a great upcoming week of work and for Career Fair, so we’ll have more to talk about on next week’s post. Thank you for reading this week’s blog post from Electric Eye!

Hi there, and welcome to team 4’s blog post for the week of 9/13! This has been an extremely productive week for the team as we build on our understandings of the project FPL has given us and finalize important pieces of our team’s charter. This post will build on last week’s, introducing more about the team. Unfortunately, our logo will have to wait for next week’s post as we make revisions to our original, but you can expect it then!

Team Electric Eye

We are Electric Eye; a name derived from the purpose of our project, it describes how our system will look into an environment and detect potential hazards. What we build will act as another eye for FPL’s on-site workers to ensure their safety, and we feel the name Electric Eye perfectly represents this!

Team Coach | Dr. Amr Abd-Elrahman

Electric Eye’s coach for the year is Dr. Abd-Elrahman, a faculty member from UF’s Geomatics department. Dr. Abd-Elrahman’s degrees are primarily in Civil Engineering, though while getting his PhD from UF, he specialized in Geomatics. Dr. Abd-Elrahman also has a minor in Computer Science from UF! We are all very excited to get to work with and get guidance from him as we undertake this project. To learn more about Dr. Amr Abd-Elrahman, click here to see his profile on the UF-IFAS website.

Team Roles/Responsibilities

As a part of our team finalizing our charter, we established roles and responsibilities. Everyone chose their roles based on what they felt comfortable handling and what would work best for the team.

• Sebastian Valdes | Team Leader
• Kate Schwitz | Meeting Facilitator/Scribe
• Timothy Ortiz | Web/Blog Editor & Design Manager
• Joshua Thomas | Outreach/Research Cordinator
• Brian Nielsen | Project Facilitator
• Aryaan Verma | Dynamic Role Manager

Each role is important and will help us foster a great environment, allowing us to stay focused and provide our best efforts. Thank you for joining us on this adventure and we can’t wait to share more! (Below is a picture of the team!)

Welcome to Team 4’s blog page for the 2024/2025 year with the IPPD program. All of us are extremely excited to have this opportunity to work with each other, our coach, and our team’s sponsor, Florida Power & Light! Our team has been tasked with building a Hazard Detection System to be deployed at various FPL work areas. We are still working on our team name/logo, which we will announce in next week’s blog, and our charter. As we move through our project, we’ll keep this blog updated weekly with what our team is up to so you can have a look at some of the progress we’re making. For now, we’d like to use this post to introduce ourselves to you!

Brian Nielsen | Computer Science

“I’m Brian Nielsen, a 4th year Computer Science major and Electrical Engineering minor. I have experience working on full-stack projects, training AI models, and TAing for circuits. In my free time, I play guitar for a band and play volleyball. I am super excited to be on the FPL team this year in IPPD!”

Timothy Ortiz | Digital Arts & Sciences

“Hey there, I’m Timothy Ortiz, a fourth year Digital Arts & Sciences major. I primarily work in Computer Graphics and UXD. This year presents an amazing opportunity to work in a professional environment, and I couldn’t be more excited for it! I can’t wait to get started working with the team!”

Kate Schwitz | Computer Science

Kate Schwitz is a Computer Science major, with a minor in Digital Arts and Science, as well the ‘AI Fundamentals and Applications’ and ‘Engineering Project Management’ Certificates offered by the University of Florida. She enjoys working on full stack projects, with her most recent being a mobile application for teachers in the Kumasi, Ghana school district with a study abroad group. Kate is also the Director of a Latin dance organization at UF, AscenDance Salsa Company, as well as a choreographer for the Extreme Dance Company. These leadership roles allow her to share her passions with her peers, while also allowing for a more creative outlet to balance and complement her technical studies.

Joshua Thomas | Computer Science

Joshua Thomas is a Computer Science major, with a minor in Innovation, as well as the “AI fundamentals and Applications” and “Engineering Project Management” certificates offered at the University of Florida. He enjoys working on AI and Machine Learning related projects. His most recent project involved creating a convolutional neural network for corn disease classification. Joshua is also Sports Director of the Indian Students Association at UF and a Research Assistant in the SHARE Lab working on the Jacksonville Digital Twin project for assessing flood vulnerability. During his free time, Joshua loves to travel, hang out with friends, play basketball, and workout.

Sebastian Valdes | Computer Engineering

“Hello! My name is Sebastian Valdes, and I am a fourth-year Computer Engineering major. I am specializing in embedded systems, but I also have a deep understanding of a variety of software engineering topics. I am excited to work with the team for these two semesters!”

Aryaan Verma | Computer Science

“I’m Aryaan Verma and I am a Computer Science major with a Math Minor. I specialize in and enjoy app development and cloud engineering. I have developed multiple apps and deployed them onto the cloud, creating a sustainable and scalable infrastructure. I also enjoy data management and engineering to get the most out of any data. Outside of computer science, I enjoy competitively dancing and exercising in the gym.”