What is Project Showcase?
Come see the innovative projects that HKN Project Teams and other project orgs around campus have been working on in HKN's first ever Project Showcase! Food and drinks will be provided, and attendees will be given the chance to judge for the most impressive project! The event will be in a symposium style format, where attendees will walk around the event space and see each project booth.
Last Year's Winner
This is our first time hosting this event. The first winner of the event will be determined soon!
Showcase Location
Price Center Ballroom West A
Showcasing Projects
FYI: These are only HKN projects, but other individual projects will also be showcased.
Harmful Algal Bloom (HAB) Prediction
Harmful algal blooms can damage marine ecosystems and release toxins. In Southern California, Lingulodinium polyedrum is a common bioluminescent algae species responsible for glowing blue waves. Bloom dynamics are highly nonlinear and influenced by many interacting environmental factors, making accurate forecasting difficult using traditional models. However, the team was able to develop a working model that predicts these blooms with an 80% true positive rate. Environmental variables are first processed using Empirical Dynamic Modeling (EDM) to capture nonlinear ecological dynamics. A trust-gate attention mechanism filters important features, while convolution layers extract short-term temporal patterns. Finally, an LSTM models long-term dependencies to generate bloom forecasts. The team presented their work at the 2025 HDSI Student Conference at UCSD.
MacroPad
Our modular MacroPad is a 9-key, 3 × 3 mechanical keypad where each key hosts its own 64 × 64 px OLED screen. The device connects to a companion Qt desktop app over a simple USB-serial link, sending scan-codes just like a conventional keyboard. Profiles stored on the PC let the MacroPad change icons and actions automatically when you switch applications, giving creators, streamers, and power-users a compact, dynamic control surface without bulky on-device menus.
Projects Portal
The HKN UCSD Projects Portal is a Next.js web application deployed on Netlify that serves as a public-facing hub for the HKN (Eta Kappa Nu) Projects branch at UCSD. It has several key components: The website has a homepage, a projects listing page, individual project detail pages, a showcase event page, and a resources page. Content is managed through Decap CMS at `/admin`, which allows non-technical team members to add/edit projects and page content via a GitHub-backed CMS that commits markdown files directly to the repo. The AI chatbot ("Ramsey") is an embedded chat widget that answers questions about HKN — its mission, projects, events, membership, and the Hard Hack competition. It supports multiple LLM providers (Claude, Gemini, OpenAI) switchable via an environment variable. It uses RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) — meaning it queries a Pinecone vector database populated with project content and website text to give grounded, accurate answers rather than hallucinating. The RAG pipeline consists of a Netlify build plugin that automatically re-indexes Pinecone after every deploy (pulling project markdown from GitHub), and a one-time indexing script that seeds the database with broader content including website pages and Google Drive documents.
Thermoacoustic Refrigerator (TAR)
A thermoacoustic refrigerator removes heat from a system using sound waves that create pressure differences inside a tube, forming a temperature gradient across the system. A standing wave is produced by the speaker, with the strongest pressure and temperature oscillations occurring near the antinode. Heat is then transferred through a thermoacoustic stack made of closely spaced parallel plates. The cold heat exchanger absorbs heat from the region being cooled, while the hot heat exchanger removes the heat. The standard engineering practices were followed in the construction of the thermoacoustic refrigerator. First, a basic design based on rigorous calculations was created. Then, that design was built in Onshape CAD and imported into Ansys for wave pressure simulations. Finally, after confirming simulation results, the physical refrigerator was built and tested. We were able to produce a temperature difference of 4 degrees Celsius within 15 minutes of activation. This project was possible thanks to Northrop Grumman and their gift funds to HKN.
FAQs
The event will be held in a symposium-style format where HKN and other organizations will present their projects at their individual booths. Each project team will have a presentation and demo set up for attendees to see and interact with. Attendees will vote for the most interesting/best project once they have looked through every project. Attendees can flexibly come and go during the duration of the event and do not have to stay for the entire time.
All HKN students are welcome to attend! We are also specially inviting professors from different departments (ECE, MAE, CSE, DSC) as well as our sponsors from Qualcomm and Northrop Grumman.
We open up the showcase to participants from HKN members, projects, and other UCSD project organizations. If you are an HKN member or part of a project organization on campus, look out for more information on next year's showcase!
Past Sponsors
