During the summer of 2016 DataYard will sponsor a summer internship program for college students to explore robotics, sensors, and concepts related to IOT — the “Internet of Things”, hardware and software that uses network connections to bridge physical and virtual worlds.
What You Will Do?
Our interns will work on a real project that has a practical application. We want you to build a robot that will roam a physical space, take environmental measurements within that space, and upload the captured sensor data to a database in the cloud. Ultimately, the physical space we want the robot to roam is DataYard’s own data center.
This, by itself, is a pretty cool project that would provide some useful environmental data for DataYard. But, of course, we want to make it a little more challenging.
Not only do we want you to store the environmental measurements, but we want to know where in the physical space each environmental sample was taken. That means you’ll also need to figure out how to capture location data with the environmental sensor data.
Finally, we’d like you to create a way to visualize all the sensor data that your robot has captured. This portion of the project could be pretty software intensive, and will need to interact with databases and web servers to produce a graphical “heat map” of our data center space to show us the environmental conditions everywhere that the robot has been.
What Resources Will You Have Access To?
We’ve got a Maker space complete with tools and parts, including a Roomba robot built platform, Arduinos, Raspberry Pis, breadboards, voltmeters, sensors, motors, batteries, lots of other circuit components, and a Taz 5 3D printer to design and custom-print your own parts.
You’ll get guidance and support along the way, along with meetings with an advisor (at least twice weekly) to keep you moving in positive directions. Most of all, you need to be a self-starter who isn’t afraid of taking chances and making mistakes as you learn. You’ll get a chance to be creative, create a project plan, manage a budget (we’ll give you up to $500 to spend on extra parts you need), report on your progress, learn a ton about how stuff on the Internet works, make something cool and useful, AND make money doing something very few people get a chance to do.
What’s The Schedule & Pay?
Our internship program will run during the summer months of June, July, and August. We’re flexible on the exact stop and start dates. We’re expecting you to work on the project here in our office in Downtown Dayton up to 20 hour a week, and we’ll pay you $10/hr to soak up as much as you can while building something super cool.
Interested?
If you’re interested in participating in the DataYard 2016 IOT Internship Program please contact me, David Mezera, by email at [email protected] on or before April 30, 2016. Tell me why you think this program is for you. Thanks for your interest! I can’t wait to get you started!
[UPDATED 4/11/2016] I’ve gotten a lot of applicants, and I now understand that some of the local schools will be letting out in May. As a result, we’ll be closing the application window on Friday, April 15, so that we can make selections before April 22. Stay tuned!
