Engineering Club drives into the future

PHOTO: Junior Charlie Sternbergh wires together a new project for the Davis Engineering Team.

By Holt Klineberg,

BlueDevilHUB.com Staff––

The Davis Engineering Team (DET) is starting to develop devices to help older cars become safer. Students seek to provide solutions to real-world problems, helping both local and global communities.

With just six members, DET managed to create a fully autonomous drive base by using computer-aided design (CAD), 3D printing, woodworking, assembling, prototyping, wiring and programming. 

Other than engineering, the team also works to secure sponsorships, host competitions and run STEM workshops for high school students with professional speakers.

“We started last year in November because we believed that the best way to further pursue engineering was getting hands-on experience,” co-founder of DET senior David Wang said. Since then, Wang has been heavily involved in programming aspects and getting sponsorships

Their current project is creating a motion sensor and camera system that can be mounted to a car. Linked to a simple phone app, the device sends alarms and signals to the phone if an object is detected too close to the car.

Senior Felipe Caceres-Fernandez, the co-founder of DET, is proud of this project because it works towards solving a real problem. “I have experienced this problem myself while driving a 12-year-old car, the old sensors are not safe and rely too heavily on the driver,”  Fernandez said.

DET has already created a prototype and is working on a final design. Only the electronics and code of the simple app still need to be done.

Junior Charlie Sternbergh is proud of his contribution to the project. “I helped choose the processor, the ESP32, a powerful computer chip which can access WiFi and compute large amounts of data,” Sternbergh said. His expertise includes electrical systems and microcontrollers. 

David Wang believes that the simple prototype is already ten times as effective as the technology 10 years ago and that it has changed his view on the advancement of engineering. 

“This device could potentially be a solution for people that can’t afford a new high-tech car but still want added safety features,” Fernandez said. 

DET’s next project will be designing a boat that could function as a search and rescue robot or an ocean cleaner.

Davis Engineering Team offers students additional engineering opportunities different from the robotics team. “We aren’t rivals or competing with robotics, we are just different,” Fernandez said. 

The engineering team is focused on potential solutions to real-world problems while the robotics team uses engineering to complete tasks in an international game. 

“We show people that a group of people can come together and work on something greater than themselves in the world of STEM,” Sternbergh said.