Renee Wrysinski, a junior in electrical and computer engineering (ECE) at Rice, has won first place in the Circuit Showdown Design Contest sponsored by Mouser Electronics.
In the final round, Wrysinski competed against two other students, from Texas State University and Prairie View A&M University. Wrysinski won the grand prize of $10,000, a $1,000 credit on mouser.com and a Keysight lab bench valued at $6,000.
Wrysinski first completed an indoor air-quality monitor in the smart-home category, and then a beehive monitoring system in the industrial automation category.
“The air-quality monitor was made of two Arduino boards with an air-quality sensor connected. The idea was that one would be outside and one would be inside, so you could determine if it makes sense to open a window to improve indoor air quality,” she said.
The second project was an Arduino with a temperature and humidity sensor, a loudness sensor and a GPS module, for tracking the locations of multiple beehives in an agricultural setting.
“All of the sensor values were displayed on a cloud dashboard that received data via the Arduino's Wi-Fi connection,” Wrysinski said. “There was also another Arduino board attached with a camera that was running a basic computer-vision model to recognize individual bees entering and exiting the hive.”
Wrysinski had experience in prototyping, she said, “But I’ve never done anything with so short of a time window as the Circuit Showdown projects. I learned a lot about planning my designs and prototyping with a very strict time constraint. The hands-on experience I’ve had at Rice through the engineering design minor and my electrical engineering labs prepared me to rapidly prototype circuits.”
After graduation, Wrysinski hopes to enter industry, perhaps in the embedded systems or hardware design fields.
Mouser is a global distributor of semiconductors and electronic components based in Mansfield, Texas.