$36,250 in Prizes Awarded at UA’s Engineering Design Day 2019
Top team helps lost hikers find their way home with cellphone app and solar-powered beacons.
A student demonstrates his team’s drone-mounted pollen dispenser at Engineering Design Day. (Photo: Chris Richards/UA Alumni Association)
Though they dropped their beacon system onto a concrete floor, submerged it in water and subjected it to extreme temperatures, five University of Arizona students won the $5,000 grand prize for their project at Engineering Design Day 2019 on April 29.
The Raytheon-sponsored team created a mesh network of beacons over remote areas that can transmit emergency signals from a phone application to a central location, such as a ranger station. The beacons can survive a 5-foot freefall, 30 minutes under a foot of water and temperatures ranging from minus 40 to 180 degrees Fahrenheit. The team, which also won the Prototron Circuits Award for Best Printed Circuit Design, designed the app and a mechanism to drop the beacons from a drone in addition to the beacons themselves.
