Welcome to Undergraduate Hardware Lab Web Page
This welcome page is used to introduce you to the Undergraduate Hardware Lab
The School of Engineering Honor Society and UC Santa Cruz Branch of IEEE has a strong interest in creating a hardware laboratory for undergraduate students. This lab will be available to any student of the School of Engineering at any hour of the day. Currently all School of Engineering undergraduate laboratories are associated with a class leaving no space for students' independent projects.
At the moment, there are many facilities available to students of the School of Engineering. The School of Engineering provides some of these, while supporting divisions of UC Santa Cruz, such as Instructional Computing, provide others. The bulk of these facilities are general-purpose computers with loaded with software suites. In addition to being very useful for classwork, these facilities are available to students after the conclusion of the class they were set up for. After students take a particular class they can continue to work on the material they learned in the class. However, this is only true of software-dependant projects. The existing public-access labs do not cater to the more practical computer and electrical engineering projects, which require fairly expensive and specific equipment.
Hardware lab classes require equipment such as soldering stations, power supplies, function generators, oscilloscopes and EEPROM burners. These are often delicate, occasionally dangerous and almost always expensive. However, outside of a class that has a dedicated room stocked by Baskin Engineering Lab Support (BELS), within the School of Engineering, students cannot get access to this equipment. Additionally, the cost often precludes a student from owning such equipment personally. Although a student can petition for access to a particular lab, this request is unlikely to be granted unless the student has a specific project in mind. Unlike a software project, the student cannot access the required tools on a whim. This makes it unlikely that a student will continue to explore the material they have learned in classes after the class’s completion.
These limitations on independent hardware design stifle creativity, and it is to alleviate these limitations that the Honor Society proposes the creation of a Hardware Lab.
Make a contribution to the undergraduate hardware lab Today!