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YSU showcases STEM projects
YOUNGSTOWN
You couldn’t tell your troubles to it, but it probably would give faster service and you wouldn’t have to tip it.
Introducing the Juice Box — an automated bartender.
In a back hallway at Moser Hall at Youngstown State University on Saturday, YSU seniors Jordan Brown and Nick Getsy were hastily trying to prepare it for display.
It was a late entry, Brown explained, among 40-plus projects in the 2015 College of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics Showcase.
An electrical-engineering project, the clunky, three-sided steel box might have seemed unassuming alongside fellow projects such as Predicting Protein Subcellular Location (mathematics and statistics) or Synthesis and Characterization of CdSxSex-1 Alloyed Quantum Dots and Silica-Shell Coating (chemistry), but it has a noble purpose.
It’s meant to be a home-automated bartending system, its brochure explains: “Our goal with this design is to promote drinking at home rather than drinking at an establishment that would require driving home,” it reads. “This will potentially save lives and reduce the amount of DUI charges in the United States.”
Take that, Use of Phage Display to Identify Specific Peptide Ligands that Bind to Human Serum Albumin (biology).
But really, it wasn’t a contest.
The showcase, said Dr. Daniel H. Suchora, who helped to organize the event, “is to show off the designs and projects that students worked on all year to the community, to prospective employers and to prospective YSU students.
“To show off YSU, because it’s one of the best-kept secrets in town,” he said.
The Juice Box is, in fact, a final senior project for Brown, Getsy and another student, Corey Dunbar, who couldn’t make it Saturday.
Does it work?
Sort of.
With $300 given by the university, supplemented by some of their own money and some material donations, the inventors put together the Juice Box on the cheap, which doesn’t help.
Brown turned it on.
After you select your drink from a menu on an Android tablet, a tray carrying a glass is supposed to slide along a track inside the box and stop under whichever ingredients are needed to complete your order.
The tray moved. Backward. Then forward. Then nothing.
There will be a conference for just the electrical engineering department Tuesday, Brown said, and they are planning to work the kinks out of the Juice Box.
After that?
Getsy can see an entrepreneurship. “We’ve talked about partnering already,” he said.
The best and the brightest were everywhere in the halls at Moser.
Among them stood Eduardo Bustillos and Michael Kunzer, juniors in mechanical engineering.
Their update of a display on how to make an electrical circuit at the OH WOW! The Roger & Gloria Jones Center for Science & Technology is more attractive and encourages learning more than the old display, they said.
“We’re in a project for a scholarship,” Bustillos explained, and their adviser connected them with OH WOW!
OH WOW! asked them to enhance a display, he said. So they decided to add modeling clay to the display of wires to make it more kid-friendly.
They made their own clay: conductor, which conducts electricity; and resistant, which electricity won’t flow through. They sandwiched resistant clay between conductor clay, put little LED lights on the resistant clay, hooked up wires to the LEDs, and the lights lit up. The display is colorful and attractive, and they are in talks with the center’s director about making it permanent.