Engineering Design Center Is the New Workshop for Capstone Teams

With just a few months until Craig M. Berge Design Day, Interdisciplinary Capstone teams are doing their final building, tweaking and testing at a facility created for their needs. The Engineering Design Center, the first makerspace open to all College of Engineering students, has since February served as a hub for student teams to develop their capstone projects. The 5,000-square-foot center, near the university’s Main Gate at Park Avenue and University Boulevard, provides 3D printers, work benches, power tools, storage lockers and more.

The EDC offers space for student clubs to gather and work on projects and even for students to work on personal projects, but the largest need now is for Interdisciplinary Capstone teams.

ECE student Lucca Magalhaes is part of a capstone team updating the design of a railcar sensor suite for maintenance detection. He says the opportunity to work on the U.S. rail system is a unique one.

The team is working with Ridgetop Group Inc. to replace obsolete or old parts of a railcar sensor system while maintaining energy consumption. The EDC will provide for many of the team’s hardware needs.

“Our team plans to use the engineering space as a hub to use electronics lab equipment while also being able to access some features such as machine tools if we need to adjust our board design,” Magalhaes said. “It is not necessarily straightforward to come by a decent oscilloscope on the fly.”

The Engineering Design Center serves as a precursor for the upcoming public face of the College of Engineering, the 100,000 square foot Student Design and Innovation Center.