Dreamboard

Hardware grants for the parts you need to ship.

$40–$200 micro-grants for hardware components. Five-minute application, one-week turnaround.

Process
  • Apply. Describe the project, list components with prices.
  • Review. Rolling. One-week turnaround.
  • Parts. Reimbursement after purchase, or procured through YCC.
  • Ship. Brief end-of-semester update.
Covered
  • Microcontrollers (Arduino, ESP32, Teensy).
  • Single-board computers (Raspberry Pi, Jetson).
  • Sensors, actuators, motor drivers.
  • Prototyping supplies.

Not covered: labor, software licenses, cloud hosting.

Apply
Funded Projects

Automated Crowd and Wait Time Estimation for the Silliman Acorn

Cutter Renowden ‘28

A privacy-conscious machine learning system to estimate occupancy and predict wait times in the Silliman Acorn. The system does not use facial recognition and instead counts the number of people present in the space.

The model runs on a Raspberry Pi with an attached camera module. To protect privacy, faces are obfuscated using Gaussian blur, no live video stream is shared, and no image or video data is stored. The system transmits only aggregate information — estimated occupancy and predicted wait time — to a public-facing website.

A ridge regression model trained on collected wait-time data predicts expected delays from observed occupancy, letting students assess crowd levels before arriving. Coordination with Silliman facilities is already in place for deployment.

Parts

  • Raspberry Pi 5 2GB
  • Camera Module 3 Wide
  • 27W Power Supply
  • Active Cooler
  • Raspberry Pi 5 Case
  • 64GB microSD Card

Predictive Modeling Indoor Air Quality Sensor

Tyler Matukonis ‘29

A low-cost indoor air quality monitor that forecasts pollution levels rather than only reporting them. Users can act before conditions degrade — opening a window, swapping an HVAC filter, stepping out of the room — instead of reacting once the air is already bad.

Predictive modeling of indoor air quality has been validated in research but isn't yet built into consumer devices. This project brings that approach to a hardware form factor priced for everyday use, helping people understand how air pollution factors into their health.

Parts

  • SEN66 Air Quality Sensor
  • ESP32 Microcontroller (×3)
  • 2.8" LCD Display
  • TP4056 Charging Module
  • 3.7V 2000mAh Battery

Portable Baymax

Ann Song ‘29

A miniature Baymax-inspired health companion. The device takes voice input describing symptoms and scans a patient's body or face using open-source LLMs and vision-language models, returning observations through a small touchscreen interface.

The software stack is functional; the grant covers the hardware needed to bring the system into a portable, embodied form — a Raspberry Pi unit with camera, microphone, speaker, and 5-inch touchscreen, packaged into a custom enclosure.

Parts

  • Raspberry Pi 5 (8GB)
  • Raspberry Pi Camera Module v2
  • 5" Touchscreen Display
  • USB Microphone
  • USB Speaker
  • Breadboard & wiring