Project

# Title Team Members TA Documents Sponsor
22 Smart Climate-Controlled Rice Dispenser
 Gaoning Zhao
Shining Wang
Yuyang Liu
Zixin Yang
 Bruce Xinbo Yu
# Problem
Rice is a staple food sensitive to environmental factors; improper storage in high temperature or humidity leads to mold, pest infestation, and loss of nutritional value. Additionally, traditional manual dispensing is often imprecise, resulting in food waste. Current market solutions are largely passive containers that fail to monitor or actively preserve rice quality.
# Solution Overview
We propose an integrated smart dispenser that provides active climate regulation and precise, automated dispensing. The system will monitor internal conditions and utilize a control loop to maintain an ideal storage environment, while a motor-driven mechanism ensures accurate portioning based on user input.
# Uniqueness & Innovation
This project is an innovation that bridges the gap between traditional food storage and automated home appliances. While competitors offer airtight seals, our system introduces active thermal management and sensor-driven feedback to guarantee freshness.
# Technical Overview
The system consists of three main sub-modules:
- Climate Control: A sensor network (Temperature/Humidity) feeding into a microcontroller to actuate a thermal management structure (fans/dehumidifiers).
- Precision Dispensing: The initial UI will feature tactile buttons for preset quantities (e.g., 100g, 200g), with a modular design that allows for upgrading to a touchscreen for custom numeric input depending on the implementation schedule.
- UI that displays real-time environment status.
# Criterion for Success
Successfully maintain storage humidity below 60% and temperature below 25°C (or 5°C below ambient).
Achieve dispensing accuracy within ±5% of the user-defined weight.
Functional UI that triggers the correct dispensing weight and displays real-time environmental status.

Logic Circuit Teaching Board

Featured Project

Partners: Younas Abdul Salam, Andrzej Borzecki, David Lee

The proposal our group has is of creating a board that will be able to teach students about logic circuits hands on. The project will consist of a board and different pieces that represent gates. The board will be used to plug in the pieces and provide power to the internal circuitry of the pieces. The pieces will have a gate and LEDs inside, which will be used to represent the logic at the different terminals.

By plugging in and combining gates, students will be able to see the actual effect on logic from the different combinations that they make. To add to it, we will add a truth table that can be used to represent inputs and outputs required, for example, for a class project or challenge. The board will be able to read the truth table and determine whether the logic the student has created is correct.

This board can act as a great learning source for students to understand the working of logic circuits. It can be helpful in teaching logic design to students in high schools who are interested in pursuing a degree in Electrical Engineering.

Please comment on whether the project is good enough to be approved, and if there are any suggestions.

Thank you