Final Report

Team Information:

Team name/project:	University of Notre Dame Team Tech/Digital Inclusion Through Solar Powered WiFi in South Bend
Team leader name:	Sophie Lancaster and Gemma Stanton
Team Contact (if different from leader):	Victoria Goodrich
Address:	257 Fitzpatrick Hall, Notre Dame, IN 46556
Phone:	574-631-1220
Email:	slancas1@nd.edu/gstanto1@nd.edu/ndswett.blogspot.com
Sponsoring School:	University of Notre Dame
Region:	Region H

Industrial Advisor Information:

Industrial Advisor Name:	Gary Gilot
Address:	President, Board of Public Works, 227 W. Jefferson Blvd., Suite 1300 County-City Building, South Bend, IN 46601
Phone:	574-876-7860
Email:	ggilot@southbendin.gov
Industrial Advisor Name:	Mike Bieganski
Email:	mike.bieganski@gmail.com

Team Members:

Name	Graduation Year	Engineering Disciplines
Gemma Stanton	2019	Civil Engineering
Sophie Lancaster	2019	Computer Science
Heather Flynn	2019	Chemical Engineering
Maddie Stanton	2020	Mechanical Engineering
Olivia Garcia-Velez	2020	Chemical Engineering
Natalie Rivas	2020	Environmental Engineering
Breanna Belz	2020	Mechanical Engineering
Holly Miller	2020	Chemical Engineering
Mackenzie Winton	2021	Mechanical Engineering
Annalena Bellm	2021	Environmental Engineering
Yilin Dwyer	2021	Computer Science
Emory Smith	2021	Computer Engineering

Industrial Partners:

Company name:	City of South Bend
Contact name:	Gary Gilot
Phone:	574-876-7860
Company name:	Southeast Organized Area Residents (SOAR)
Contact name:	Conrad Damian
Email:	conraddamian@sbcglobal.net
Company name:	466 Works
Contact name:	Eugene Hale
Email:	cehale@sbgtv.com
Company name:	Inovateus Solar
Contact name:	Melody Callander
Email:	melody.callander@inovateus.com
Company name:	nCloud
Contact name:	Mike Bieganski
Email:	mike.bieganski@gmail.com
Company name:	South Bend Venues, Parks, and Arts
Contact name:	John Martinez
Email:	jmartine@southbendin.gov

Executive Summary of Project and Results

This year the Notre Dame chapter of Society of Women Engineers Team Tech collaborated with the community of South Bend to build a solar-powered connectivity pavilion. The prototype of the pavilion is to be located in the Southeast Neighborhood park – accessible to all – and will house solar panels that power the WiFi. Multiple factors, such as proximity to free WiFi and income demographics, were considered before deciding on the location of the prototype. In order to accomplish this project, our team split into three subgroups that had more refined tasks. The Connectivity subgroup focused on the WiFi capabilities of the pavilion, taking into consideration not only the technical aspects of providing free WiFi for the neighborhood (router choice, local ISPs, existing infrastructure), but also the legal responsibilities that come with providing internet access on a public network. This subgroup aimed to make the WiFi network feasible, reliable, and safe for everyone to use. The Energy subgroup focused on how to provide power to the pavilion. The group decided to use solar panels to provide the power. The solar panels connect to a battery that stores energy for use when the solar panels do not provide enough. Finally, the Structure subgroup focused on the future use of the connectivity pavilion. The current prototype that we built will become a guide for the Parks Department, as they will further implement this technology in parks and vacant lots across South Bend. Future pavilions will be housed with a permanent structure that will allow people to have a safe place to use the internet. Eventually, the structure may be heated and run completely on solar energy (including heating, lighting, and connectivity), allowing all users to have a reliable internet source running on renewable energy. Our stakeholders and industry partners have been an essential component when creating this prototype, which led to an immense amount of interaction with people and companies around Notre Dame and South Bend. As a team we were able to accomplish many of our goals and a lot of this success can be attributed to our generous industry partners.

Project Results

Overall, we achieved much of what we set out to do with this project. Before we even began our project we had a meeting with our industry advisor, Gary Gilot, to make sure that we wanted to do was feasible. Once Gary told us that the connectivity pavilions seemed like a good project and that he had community contacts that could help us we decided to proceed. Our project would not have been anywhere near as successful as it was if it had not been for Gary and all of the contacts that he was able to give us. After this initial meeting we began to contact the industry sponsors that Gary suggested and the project really got under way. We held initial meetings with our industry partners to see what resources we would need and what resources they would be willing to provide us with. Simultaneously while these stakeholder meetings were taking place, as a team we were trying to figure out where we should implement our pavilion by considering the main points of concern that we had identified with the help of the neighbors in the Southeast neighborhood. Overall, we were able to secure all of the resources and materials necessary to create the connectivity pavilion with the help of our partners, create a final plan to pass off to the Venues, Parks, and Arts Department for future implementation purpose, and create an ArcGIS tool that can be used to help determine future locations for the pavilions. These three things are the main results of our project but we hope to accomplish a couple other concrete results during the summer. For example, we have been in contact with a city electrician and a solar panel company who have both agreed to help us do the final installation. After the initial install happens we also hope to monitor the pavilion and get concrete results on the impact that this type of project can have on the community and its members. Another part of monitoring the pavilion’s success will involve final meetings with our industry partners to get their feedback on how they thought the project went, its relevance and importance in the city, and if they think we could have done anything differently. While we do hope to receive this final feedback over the summer, one thing that our team did well throughout the project was staying in continuous contact with our partners. In order to help with this we created a team blog that we shared with all of our partners. We would update this blog with essential information about the project and it acted as a way to share updates with our partners without having to reach out to each partner individually. Throughout the project we were able to accomplish many things and deliver a result that we were very proud of and we will continue to grow on this success over the next couple months.

Lessons Learned

Throughout a large-scale project like this there are many lessons that are learned. First of all we realized the importance of building the connections with community partners early on. This part of the process takes a while with all the emails, phone calls, and meetings that go into constructing the initial relationship. While we did a decent job of this throughout the project, we agree that starting the process even earlier would be beneficial to getting the project underway more quickly. Along the same lines, we realized the importance of having a definite ask and specific details when attending initial meetings with industry partners. This aspect was challenging for us because we came up with our project from scratch, so sometimes we did not have all the answers that the community members wanted. However, this helped us learn what was important to certain partners and made us realize what questions needed to be answered. When we ran into this issue we would take their questions back with us and work on coming up with details and answers to those specific questions. Another thing that we learned is the importance of having deadlines and detailed tasks. Initially our deadlines were in the form of our initial project milestones and then eventually we split up into separate subgroups that created their own goals. This allowed us to stay on track and accomplish most of our initial goals. Being even more specific and detailed about these deadlines and tasks could help to further increase the productivity and efficiency of the team. Overall, it is important to make note of these learning points throughout a project like this and use them as a way to grow in the future.

Final Schedule Status

Below is a list of the project milestones and deliverables that we proposed at the beginning of this project.

For the most part throughout the course of this project we were able to follow this timeline and accomplish all the goals that we intended to. During the first semester our team met a couple times to get to know each other and become acquainted with our project. Over winter break all members of the team were asked to do some preliminary research about different aspects of the project. During the spring semester we began having meetings with industry partners and identifying logistics of the project such as where we would install the prototype and how we would get the resources necessary to make our connectivity pavilion possible. Much of the time that we budgeted for obtaining funding and buying necessary materials became unnecessary because we had very generous donors and industry partners. Additionally, it ended up that a couple of the major tasks outlined below could be done simultaneously and so we were able to create the ArcGIS tool and final plan while implementation logistics were getting figured out. While we were able to accomplish most of the things that we set out to do, a couple things remain to be done over the summer. We are fortunate enough that a few of our team members have internships in South Bend this summer and will be able to finish the implementation of the pavilion and meet with our industry partners to receive their final feedback. Overall, outlining these initial deliverables and milestones was an important step in the project because it provided us with direction as we made progress.

Initial Major Project Milestones/Deliverables:

• Conduct research on three main components of the pavilions: structure, connectivity, and energy (Deadline: Jan. 23, 2018)
• Identify existing structure in which to prototype connectivity pavilion (Deadline: Jan. 30, 2018)
• Present design to industry partners and identify plans for funding the project (Deadline: Feb. 6, 2018)
• Obtain funding for the project from grants and local sponsors (Deadline: Feb. 13, 2018)
• Buy necessary materials for project (Deadline: Feb. 20, 2018)
• Implement design in existing structure (Deadline: Mar. 6, 2018)
• Conduct further research using the Vacant Lot Optimization Matrix to determine optimal locations for more connectivity pavilions (Deadline: Mar. 27, 2018)
• Create plan which includes costs and impact assessment for future green connectivity pavilions (Deadline: Apr. 10, 2018)
• Finalize plan and present to stakeholders (Deadline: Apr. 17, 2018)
• Final Team Tech submission (Deadline: Apr. 24, 2018)

Updated Team Labor

Our team labor throughout the project was very close to the hours that we proposed in our initial proposal. Weekly meetings with the whole team were held on Tuesday evenings and typically lasted about an hour. A list has been included below that outlines what was discussed at each of our weekly meetings. Additionally, we often had hour long bi-weekly meetings with various industry partners that all team members were encouraged to attend. Another list is included below that outlines what industry partner meetings we had throughout the year. Additionally, on the weeks when we did not have our industry meetings team members were asked to do outside “homework” which included things like writing posts for our blog (ndswett.blogspot.com), composing emails to industry partners, and finally conducting any additional research relevant to their sub-teams tasks. In total this ended up being about two hours a week per team member. The leaders of the team, Gemma and Sophie, held hour long weekly meetings on Sundays to construct the agenda for the weekly meeting and to discuss any future plans for the project. Apart from our team meetings we also had monthly team bonding activities to ensure that we fostered a strong team foundation to build the project on. Team bonding included a trip to a local restaurant for brunch, an afternoon spent supporting Notre Dame’s Women’s Basketball, an afternoon spent presenting about our project at a research fair, and a trip to the park where our pavilion was implemented.

List of topics discussed at weekly meetings:

• 10/2/17 → introduction meeting → what do you hope to get out of being on this team → project update and tentative schedule
• 11/9/17 → update from first industry partner meeting with SOAR and 466Works → discussion about funding → discussion about additions to our pavilions
• 11/30/17 → first meeting as sub-teams → discuss scope of each sub-team
• 1/23/18 → plan for meeting with Venues, Parks, and Arts Department → discuss interesting research finds from break → write emails to future project partners
• 1/30/18 → update on progress with industry partners regarding funding and resources → create matrix to choose pavilion to be used for prototyping → write initial blog post for the blog introducing the team
• 2/6/18 → discussion about the Park Board meeting → update from sub-teams about progress and meetings with industry partners → finalize decision matrix for prototyping pavilion
• 2/13/18 → work on presentations for Park Board and SWE general meeting → sub-teams split up for small group work
• 2/20/18 → update on progress with industry partner meetings → sub-teams make concrete timelines for their goals for the semester → competition rubric analysis
• 2/27/18 → work on the blog → sub-teams work on individual timelines
• 3/6/18 → work on design diagram → sub-teams work on individual timelines
• 3/27/18 → blog and meeting updates → sub-teams work on individual timelines
• 4/3/18 → design potential signage for pavilion → update on members highs and lows of project
• 4/10/18 → design poster for IEEE fair → sub-teams work on individual timelines
• 4/24/18 → work on final report / presentation → sub-teams work on individual timelines
• 5/1/18 → discussion about personal evaluations and future plans for the project

List of industry partner meetings:

• Initial meeting with SOAR and 466Works to propose our initial idea and get a sense of the reception for a project like this amongst the citizens of South Bend.
• Presentation at the SOAR board meeting to again propose our idea and get a feel for the interest in the pavilions by neighbors in the Southeast Neighborhood.
• Meeting with the Venues, Parks, and Arts Department to propose our project idea and get a sense of their willingness to help provide access to their facilities and resources.
• Meeting with Mike Bieganski with nCloud to discuss the current WiFi infrastructure in South Bend and how we can make use of that for this project. Additionally discussed what the next steps should be moving forward and how he can help provide us with many of the resources that we will need.
• Meeting with Inovateus Solar to discuss partnership and sponsorship options, including solar consulting and PV panel sourcing.
• Park Board meeting to present our idea and update the Venues, Parks, and Arts Department board on the research and implementation we are planning.
• Structure sub-team met with our advisor, Gary, to discuss how we might make use of GIS in the future planning stages of this project and additionally who would be the best contact for us to learn about the capabilities of GIS.
• Three meetings with Matthew Sisk, the GIS librarian at Notre Dame, to help create the ArcGIS tool that was used to find future locations around the city to implement connectivity pavilions.
• Second meeting with Mike Bieganski to get the WiFi access unit he is provided us with and had further discussion on the logistics of the WiFi.