Under the control of freshman Daniel Bessonov, the quadcopter drone hovered, facing the club members as they posed for a picture on the bench of the math quad. With the tap of a finger on a smartphone, the phone-controlled camera attached to the drone captured the group photo.
This is just one example of the Internet of Things (IoT) Club meetings, which occur Mondays at lunch in adviser Meghan Pickett’s room 105. During meetings the 20 members develop their own technology from basic components, such as motors and wires. The club was founded this year by its current co-presidents, Bessonov, sophomore Aayush Gupta and freshman Patrick Li, who plan out an assortment of projects for members to work on each week.
So far, members have built laser tripwires and games, instruments that are controlled by a phone’s flashlight, a joystick-controlled LED grid, motors that can open combination locks in one second, gesture-controlled objects and a device deemed a “combo breaker” that pick locks. Later in the year, the club hopes to work on projects that positively impact the school, hopefully involving NFC tags, which are sensors that communicate with other devices once in range.
“Unlike classes or other clubs, we build what we want to build, at a pace that we want to build at,” Gupta said. “A project like the combo breaker would be shut down in any other classroom and too expensive for most clubs, so IoT club is really the only place [where] we can truly be creative.”
IoT has been able to afford their materials for their various projects with funding from Micron Foundation, which agreed to sponsor the club after the officers caught the company’s interest in a conversation over email.
“Sometimes we joke that we're almost like a startup: We meet in a garage to brainstorm ideas, sitting around a ping-pong table with electronics strewn all over the place in order to figure out how to conduct our next meetings,” Gupta said.
The founders first met this past summer at the A-Star Computer Science Camp. After finding out that they all attended Saratoga High, they began thinking about how they could create a tech club.
“We wanted to create a more applied version of a computer science club,” Gupta said. “So, we took one of the hottest topics in tech today, the internet of things, and decided to play around with projects.”
The Internet of Things is the idea that household appliances are connected to the internet and one another to make everyday life easier.
The founders took a bizarre but successful approach to attracting members. Before their first meeting, they announced that they would randomly give out 50 Pearl Milk Teas, a popular drink on campus, and over 60 people showed up.
“We wanted to do something crazy that no other club had ever thought of doing to show how unique our club is,” Gupta said. “It paid off, because although our initial investment was out of pocket, we quickly attracted enough members to establish a club with enough members to attract funding from Micron Foundation.”
Gupta embraces having dedicated members in the club, and he and his fellow officers have a goal to finish a unique project and to “pass on the reins to equally passionate kids.”
“We want to be able to impact anyone who wants experience building products of the future,” Bessonov said.