Document Type

Restricted Campus Only

Publication Date

4-30-2026

Abstract

This project is designed to deliver upon the requirements and expectations of Dr. Mehran Aminian of St. Mary’s University. As the project sponsor, he requested an iterative improvement upon the work of previous years’ senior design projects. These projects focused on supplying water to areas in deserts over long periods of time without water supply replenishment. Now, our team seeks to adapt the design to emergency situations, particularly natural disaster relief efforts. In such emergency situations, it can be helpful to be able to deliver supplies and retain needed personnel elsewhere. To meet this need, Dr. Aminian has asked us to create a device, or more so a potential suite of devices, that can be deployed in tandem and create a depot to deliver supplies to victims without the need for oversight by trained personnel.

The goal of this project is to solve the problems associated with typical supply depots, namely the necessity for trained volunteers to manage and report supplies and request stock replenishment. Since designing an entire supply depot is outside the scope of a senior design project, we have elected to focus our efforts on creating a modular system to accomplish these goals. Our project will serve to create one prototype storage container, capable of folding flat to ease transportation, designed to hold small boxes of medicine, with the goal of demonstrating the technology used could be reconfigured to support the tracking of several specified supplies that are necessary in disaster situations.

In order to achieve the broader goals of the project as well as fulfill the working criteria, our team distinguished the project into multiple subsystems that together encompassed all of the design functionality necessary. We describe the general functionality of the product and then how each subsystem targets the necessary SMART objectives. The sensor array subsystem was designed to achieve SMART objective one, the electrical power subsystem targeted SMART objective three, the communication subsystem supports SMART objective two, and the container subsystem ties all the subsystems together and supports the project goal of providing supplies to victims.

Despite showing promise last semester and early this semester, our team failed to demonstrate our integrated design’s fulfillment of the SMART objectives as of writing this report. This stems from continually issues with transmitting data from the collection microcontroller to the transmitting microcontroller. The team had previously demonstrated this functionality early in the semester, yet attempts to port the code, wiring, and sensors from the wooden prototype to the final plastic design were continually resisted by unknown issues. Many explicit and potential issues were identified and fixed, but the communication problem remained. However, the team has managed to demonstrate that most subsystems are functioning independently.

As a result of being unable to complete the SMART objectives, the team was unable to complete the sponsor requirements for functionality. Despite this, promising results from the individual subsystems provide hope and a clear path towards successful design changes that will allow us to present our sponsor with a successful prototype by the final presentation day.

In order to achieve a working prototype, we plan to move from protoboards to printed circuit boards, as well as move all code and functionality from the transmitting microcontroller to the collection microcontroller to eliminate the non-functional subsystem. Once we have done so, we will make sure to notify our project sponsor. We would like to thank our project sponsor and advisor Dr. Mehran Aminian as well as SrDA Dr. Darin George. We invite readers to contact us with questions, comments, or concerns as we present our final project report.

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Dr. Mehran Aminian, Team Adviser and Sponsor

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