ISTC proposes to launch a center, using seed funding from SSC, where UI students and staff will bring their personal electronic devices for assistance with assessment and repair. We call this center the Illini Gadget Garage (hereafter referred to as “Gadget Garage” or “Garage”).
Using the same “collaborative repair” model employed at the campus bike shop and MakerSpace Urbana (http://makerspaceurbana.org/projects/computer-help-desk/), clients with devices in need of repair/troubleshooting will work together with Gadget Garage student staff and volunteers to perform the necessary device assessment and maintenance activities. Depending upon the situation, activities may range from guidance on how to make your computer/device run faster to actual repair and replacement of components.

Desired outcomes for students, staff, and the community include:

1. Hands on experiences for UI students, not only in terms of performing repairs, but also in process documentation and fostering sustainable behavior on a larger scale through the iFixit Technical Writing Project; marketing and business operations; lessons in industrial design for repair and recyclability; and in environmental education and communication.
2. Increased awareness of electronics laws and recycling options.
3. Increased awareness of sustainability issues surrounding electronic products throughout their lifecycles.
4. Decreased misconceptions regarding the disposability of devices and prohibitive complexity of electronics repair and maintenance.
5. Contribution to the overall efforts to make ours a more sustainable campus with a reduced carbon footprint.

Japan House and the University of Illinois Arboretum request funding to provide bike racks on their grounds. There are currently no available bike racks in the 57-acre Arboretum and Japan House grounds. Japan House is the site of University classes and the Arboretum is frequently used as a resource for classes from units such as Landscape Architecture, and Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences. In addition, the Arboretum and the Japan House Gardens are a major recreational resource for students, faculty and staff and the general public. The Japan House offices are located at the site and students routinely ask where they should lock up their bikes. Currently, with no bike racks, bikers are forced to lock bikes to benches, lampposts, etc. Funding is supplied for the installation of two six loop bike racks and pavers (to ensure that the surface is permeable), and related biking signage.

The Makers UIUC Bike Seat Project is a student-centered venture to design, produce, and distribute an environmentally-friendly and economical bike seat cover in order to promote biking on campus. By providing a way of protecting bicycle seats, we are addressing the problems of biking in adverse weather conditions. Our intention is not only to design a product made with environmentally friendly materials, but to encourage the use of eco-friendly transportation as a whole.

This project is to build and test a scaled-down prototype of the electrical system of a solar car. The major parts of this prototype are the solar array, maximum power point trackers (MPPT), rechargeable batteries, and a load. The solar array will be made of flexible silicon crystalline solar cells encapsulated (to protect from debris and enhance performance) and mounted on a contoured composite panel that mimics the surface of our car body. The applicant will design and build our own MPPT which is a variable DC/DC boost converter that raises the voltage of their array. The MPPT has a feedback loop control to ensure maximum output from the array under different insolation and temperatures. The rechargeable batteries will be Li-ion batteries that will act as a buffer energy source when sunlight is not available or is insufficient to power the system. Although Li-ion batteries have a high energy density, they require a battery management system to ensure safe and optimal operation. Thus, they will purchase a battery management system that is suitable for our car. Lastly, the energy generated by the solar array will power a load, which will be a motor planned to be borrowed from another team.

This project is intended to permanently set up styrofoam (expanded polystyrene, or EPS) recycling on the UIUC campus for the first time. This project aims to emulate a very successful program at the University of Wisconsin at Madison; some funding has already been secured for student support and supplies from UW as part of an EPA grant that students and postdocs there have received. The key difference between UIUC and UW is that UW had the benefit of a local styrofoam recycler, and UIUC does not have that benefit: the closest recycler is in Indianapolis and the cost of transporting undensified EPS is too high for this to be viable. This project will establish a partnership with Community Resource, Inc. in Urbana, who have agreed to handle all of the logistics of picking up styrofoam from large containers (“gaylords”) in campus buildings, transporting it to their site, feeding it into a machine called a “densifier”, and selling the densified material to a company in Chicago. Community Resource, Inc. will in return pay back a portion of the proceeds from the sales in order to support student interns on campus who will promote and support the program. The goal of this project is to establish a self-supporting program that will ultimately capture most of the styrofoam waste from our campus and recycle it, while supporting student interns to oversee and continually improve the program.

The goal of this project is to further develop the relationship between the university, the Illini Algae Club and its students, the Agricultural and Biological Engineering Department as well as other departments, and the Abbott Power Plant. Using a pre-established waste to algae remediation system used in experimental design, we will apply this system to a real-world use. We will do this through the use of a semester project focused on remediation of university wastewater that can be scaled up into a larger scale project in the future that the club can build off of. Our goal is to provide the foundation of active student involvement for which our organization can grow.

We will do this by first analyzing how well our small-scale systems can work with the local Abbot Power Plant waste. This further enhances our cooperative relationship with the Abbott Power Plant. Once we determine feasibility of the system, then the students can design and build a larger scale system at the local power plant that can reduce their waste as well as produce some renewable energy for the university. This will provide the ability of students to make their own choices with our small-scale experiment as well as allow them to create a vision of their own for the club’s future larger scale activities.

Allerton Park already has a solar array located near its Visitors’ Center. The second phase of the Allerton Park Solar Array project involves working with a Learning In Community (LINC) class to construct a second ground-mounted solar recharge array. This second phase builds on the success of the existing array with the adjacent construction of an additional 60 panels. The design of the Phase 2 array utilizes an innovative floating foundation system that allows for portability of the array if necessary. The total array provides 14.7kW of peak power, which translates to a projected annual output of 14,653 kWh(about 15-20% of total apCAP solar goals). Power at the panel and array level can be monitored remotely and be publicly viewable via an online dashboard which displays the impact of the solar power contribution in terms of energy equivalents: gallons of gasoline, light bills, tons of coal, barrels of crude oil, and planted trees.