Second place at #PCBeTheChange 2022

A team of students from Lee Kong Chian Faculty of Engineering and Science (LKC FES), consisting of Bachelor of Electrical and Electronic Engineering with Honours student Vieri Loo Ka Fei, Bachelor of Mechatronics Engineering with Honours student Jefferson Ting Kit Din, Bachelor of Electrical and Electronic Engineering with Honours student Leong Rong Chuan, and Bachelor of Science (Honours) Physics student Elton Mah Song Zhe won second place at The Innovation for Environmental Change 2022 International Student Design Competition (#PCBeTheChange), held virtually from September to December 2022.

The team enthused, “First of all, we’re pleased to hear that we were awarded Second Place in this international-level competition. As a resident of Selangor, Malaysia, it was heartbreaking to see the tremendous damage caused by floods and water pollution. It is indeed our pleasure to apply our knowledge in electronics to come up with a solution to contribute to the community. Besides, we would like to express our appreciation to Upverter Education for giving us the opportunity to present our solution, as well as for giving suggestions on improving our PCB design. We hope that our solution will not only be beneficial to Selangor, but also to other nations around the world that are facing similar issues.” The team received USD750, a free microcontroller device named Arduino Portenta H7 and virtual access to the IPC APEX EXPO organised in San Diego, California from 24 January to 26 January 2023. Their Arduino Portenta H7and Upverter designed will also be manufactured for free (an estimated value of USD2,500).

The team also thanked LKC FES academic Ir Prof Dr Chung Boon Kuan, and said, “UTAR has provided us with a platform where we gained practical experience from the Integrated Design Project, which required us to solve a certain problem through the use of Internet of Things (IoT). Prof Chung also provided us with many valuable suggestions and ways to implement our solution in a more effective way.”

Prof Chung commented, “I am very proud of the students’ courage, initiative, dedication, diligence, teamwork, innovation, and resourcefulness much more than their excellent achievements of winning second place in the international competition for university students. The students took the initiative to join the competition without much information and knowledge about it. They were dedicated to learning all the necessary requirements and designing the electronic system and printed circuit board (PCB) using Upverter Modular PCB design software. They registered to join the competition in late September 2022 which was nearing the closing date. Nevertheless, they worked very hard to complete all the tasks of designing, report writing, making a pre-recorded video presentation, and real-time online interviews with the panel of judges. They completed everything on time before the submission deadline in November 2022. They have done an excellent job; they truly deserve the honour of winning second place in the international competition.”

The award-winning project titled “Poseidon”, aims to provide an IoT-based solution to solve both flood and water pollution issues in Selangor. The main scope of the project is to design a PCB as a sensor node that could extract and process data such as water level and water quality parameters (e.g. dissolved oxygen level and pH level). The PCB will be designed using Upverter Modular to ease the process of PCB routing, and the design will be integrated with Arduino Portenta H7. The project is also related to Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 6: Clean Water and Sanitation, and SDG 11: Sustainable Cities and Communities.

They explained, “Recent news has reported that damages on human properties and wildlife habitat were caused by floods alone in Selangor. Besides, it was also recorded that more than one million consumers in the city faced water supply disruption due to the water pollution issue in 2020. Thus, we as the residents of the city thought to implement a smart approach to solve the local issues as a way to improve the lives of citizens as well as to protect the natural habitat from being damaged. Since the accumulated data are stored in a database, the dataset could be useful for the data analysts to forecast the future action needed to handle the local environmental issues before the problems worsen.” 

The second annual international student design competition was jointly organised by IPC Education Foundation, Upverter Education, a division of Altium, and Arduino, with the aims to engage, educate, and enhance students’ proficiencies in PCB design, and with a focus on solving some of the world’s most pressing environmental challenges. Teams were required to address challenges that impact their communities using Altium’s Upverter Modular PCB design software and the Arduino Portenta H7 to create a prototype design that will improve the environment.