IEEE Tech. Industry Night 2023

“Innovate, Design, Sustain (IDS) is the first sustainability-focused design club at UBC Okanagan. Our club promotes sustainability on our campus and local community through project-based initiatives. Currently, our initiatives include:

• Solar Bench Project, where we are installing solar-powered benches on campus to create outdoor workspaces. Our team is designing the mechanical, electrical, software, and structural aspects of the benches, we are also attending the CPCI Wellness Bench Design Competition.
• Solar Decathlon Design Challenge, which is a net-zero building design competition hosted by the US Department of Energy. We have partnered up with TRU, Smith + Andersen, RJC Engineers, as well as other industry partners for this competition.
• Campus Waste Initiatives, where we are revolutionizing the way we manage, sort and recycle waste on campus. We achieve this through design-based and creative solutions, working directly with UBC Facilities Management.”

UBCO Motorsports is the University of Okanagan’s FSAE team; a group of engineering students who design and build a formula style car to compete at an international competition put on by the Society of Automotive Engineers. Our scope of work ranges from chassis design and finite element analysis, to aerodynamic design and data analysis. We are currently in the midst of building our MK. IV vehicle, which will be attending competition in May, as well as setting the groundwork for development of an electric car. Each year we rely on our amazing community partners and sponsors to help turn our members’ hard work into the car we compete with, and are always looking for new partnerships to push the club further forward!

A safe, fun and relaxing space for students and faculty from all disciplines in UBCO to make battlebots! This club has the long term goal of hosting several battlebots competitions between Universities in Kelowna.

We, the Stratoneers, are working on a project with the Canadian Space Agency for testing hardware protective techniques to mitigate the occurrence of bit flips due to cosmic radiation in computer’s binary code. Through our stratosphere balloon flight, we will get to investigate the performance of 2 different types of hardware protection against radiation. Building on our experience from our first flight last year, we have improved our setup to better fit the parameters in the stratosphere. Moreover, we are working to build a map of radiation against height on our flight and verify the cause of the bit flips.

The concrete toboggan club at UBCO is a student design team which competes in the annual Great Northern Concrete Toboggan Race (GNCTR), the largest and longest running engineering competition in Canada. Every year we design and manufacture a toboggan comprising a roll cage, braking system, and steering system as well as concrete skis. Students manufacture the vast majority of components themselves in the schools machining facilities as well as complete concrete mix testing in our structures lab. This year, the competition was held in Kelowna by previous UBCO Concrete Toboggan alumni. Our team did very well, scoring highest for our braking system, technical reports, and technical presentation. Notably, we also placed second overall for our steering system and roll cage. These resulted in a fourth-place overall finish.

RentalHunt is an automated marketplace platform application for rental properties as well as a rental management application, connecting local property owners directly to tenants seeking to rent their units! Once the landlord chooses through a list of vetted tenants, they can use our platform to conveniently manage their property during the rental period. With a multitude of services accessible through their fingertips such as moving, cleaning renters insurance, auto-apply, group-apply, split rent, etc, we aim to make stressful rental management more streamlined and hassle-free. We use Artificial Intelligence to screen tenants and develop a scoring system and blockchain to add an extra layer of security.

The Okanagan Engineers in Medicine Club is a student-led organization that brings together students from different disciplines with a shared passion for biotechnology. The club is dedicated to promoting education, innovation, and development in the field of biotechnology, specifically through the creation of biotech devices. The club has a strong competition and conference department that prepares students to participate in ventures across North America, providing a platform to showcase their skills and ideas. The projects and research department of the club focuses on educating, innovating, and developing, providing students of all skill levels with the opportunity to pursue their passion in biotechnology.

We are team Eco-Walk, a first-year engineering team attending the University of British Columbia - Okanagan Campus, and we have found our passion through exploring new and innovative sustainable energy sources. Currently we are hard at work on our latest project called Eco-Walk, which addresses the need for humans to get active and the need to charge devices while on the move. The product in question has the ability to transfer the kinetic energy from the compressive force of someone walking and charge a power bank that can be used to charge devices. This nifty apparatus fits tightly to shoes of any size with an adjustable sizing bracket and is placed directly on the heel so the user can mindlessly generate free electricity without any disruption. Never again will the user have to wait for their phone to charge using a wall socket and instead they can harness the power of Eco-Walk to ensure they can use their devices. Subsequently, we are in the process of making an app that tracks the power output and awards you for reaching power generating goals which provides incentive to get users moving and contribute to the reduction of the global energy crisis. We are excited to further develop this project and share it with the world.

We are a new tech start-up that focuses on tackling the issue of household food waste in Canada. Our goal is to provide a grocery consumption assistant to support consumers in the processes of grocery shopping, organizing, tracking and consuming their groceries with the aim of reducing food waste and generating additional financial savings. Our final product will help users plan their grocery shopping, alert them when items will expire, and provide recipes to use up leftover ingredients. Additionally our app will also provide users with tips on how to reduce food waste, such as freezing leftovers and donating to food banks.