My Experience at UBC's PIEE Lab

Two summers ago, I had just returned from the Canada-Wide Science Fair in Fredericton. My project, developing an autonomous fire fighting home robot, was an exciting journey that taught me a lot.

After a little break, I was fortunate enough to be accepted to volunteer at the Plant-Insect Ecology & Evolution(PIEE) lab at UBC, developing a "smart trap" for studying insects.

Working closely with postdoc Dr. Quentin Geissmann, we developed a smart insect trap that can automatically monitor and classify insects, from idea to prototype.

Designing with principles of scalability, ease of use and low cost in mind, our vision for the traps was an accessible, plug & play data collection tool for scientists, farmers and the masses.

By monitoring insect enterings, our traps have implications for studying insect biodiversity and behaviour, as well as for organic farming. For example, the traps could be used to compare the performance/effectiveness of different natural agri-chemicals.

Through my tasks, I learned a lot and gained a lot of valuable experience. These included:

- 3D CAD design, 3D printing

- using an Arduino microcontroller

- basic circuit prototyping

- basic signal processing (smoothing algorithms)

The project is still under development by Quentin and you can learn more about it here (it's now called "StickyPi")!

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Besides these hard skills, I got to meet and work with some amazing people from various fields. Shoutout to Professor Carrillo, Jordan, Jennifer, Chelsea, Matt, Jimmy and

Quentin who was an absolutely incredible mentor and friend, and I am so grateful to him for his patience in teaching me during my position there, as well as for going out of his way to improve my skills.

Through my exposure to the lab group, I saw first-hand great teamwork and leadership in action. I am grateful to everyone in that group for making me feel so welcomed and for helping me learn and improve.