One of the team winners of the BoilerMake Hackathon created their invention with Halloween weekend in mind.
The Halloween Party Station will get its first workout on campus this weekend fresh from its win October 18. One of its inventors, Dominick Lee, will also be celebrating his birthday with the award-winning entry. Lee, a sophomore electrical engineering technology major, created the station with teammates Vignesha Bhamidi, an electrical engineering technology graduate student, and Harun Sentosa, a student in the College of Science.
The Halloween Party Station, according to the BoilerMake site, is designed to be synchronized with an interactive audio-visual application. The user can use motion control to play while seemingly dancing to the dynamic music and visuals. The team added other features to make the user feel like the application reacts to actions. For example, a balloon will pop at the peak of the user's performance while a 3D-printed bobblehead grooves to the beat of the music. Colored lights run in random sequence or flash rapidly depending on the user motion. Read more about the project on the BoilerMake site.
The party station is the latest in a string of successes for two of the team members.
Lee and Bhamidi have worked together on several projects since they met in the Boilermaker 3D Printing Lab in Knoy Hall last year, including the R2-PU telepresence robot and the BoilerRover autonomous rover assistant. Lee is also the creator of Kleidoma, an installation-free SmartLock, and GyroPalm, a long-distance, wearable universal remote for your wrist. All of these inventions can be see on Lee's own entrepreneur site.
When they aren’t coming up with fun inventions, they are doing their part to grow the campus entrepreneurial community. They created the BoilerDriver Initiative to help student innovators and entrepreneurs connect, interact and publicize their inventions to the University and beyond. As part of the initiative, they have applied for support from University Innovation Fellowship program offered by Venture Well at Stanford University with assistance and mentorship from the Purdue Polytechnic dean’s office.