01 / Index
Ten builds across hardware, software, signals and energy. Each case study covers the constraint that shaped the design, what was measured, and what the result actually was.
10 projects shown
A full feasibility, design and performance study for DUT's Steve Biko S-Block: appliance-level load audit, hourly simulation in MATLAB, sizing sweep and 25-year economics for a grid-connected solar-wind-battery system.
An XGBoost surrogate that predicts LTE RSRP coverage from terrain and clutter in seconds instead of the seven to nine days taken by Telkom's manual ray-tracing workflow. Winner of the SATNAC 2026 Industry Solutions Challenge, Telkom topic, and named Innovator of the Year for the best solution.
A 6-wheel rocker-bogie rover built with the DUT SSC Mars Rover Team for the national Cars4Mars competition: terrain-adaptive drive, an 80 m wireless link, and onboard vision for target detection.
A self-hosted camera server that streams live video to the browser, runs YOLO11 on every frame, records continuously, and stays usable over a Cloudflare tunnel.
A four-quadrant light sensor that drives a dual-axis solar tracker: four LDRs and 10 k dividers into an Arduino Uno, an L298N motor stage, limit switches, an I2C display and a 300 ms control loop.
A distance sensor built from a 555 timer, an LM358 amplifier and comparator stages, with three LEDs showing close, medium and far. No microcontroller: the decision is made entirely in analogue hardware.
A light that only switches on when it is dark and someone moves: an LDR divider, a PIR sensor, a comparator and a transistor driver, designed in Multisim and laid out as a PCB in Ultiboard.
A communications lab study of frequency-shift keying and function-generator circuits: how a carrier is shifted between two frequencies to carry binary data, and how sine, square, triangle and sawtooth waveforms are generated for test work.
A concept and poster for an AI-enabled public transport platform for Durban: arrival prediction, live fleet tracking and operational optimisation, presented by Team Still Lazy.
A DSP study of how adaptive filters detect and suppress jamming in military radio systems, covering LMS beamforming, anti-jam receivers and the measured data products engineers use to tune them.