 A little over a year ago the thought came to people that subsequent centennials coming up it would be nice to have a student led project you know to commemorate the 150th anniversary of Purdue. Primarily what we do in EPICS is talk about the engineering design process and so they had to start with what should this even look like. They finally decided that the bell tower would be a good landmark. Basically when I came on as a design lead my first semester I took the project and took it from just an idea to actually figuring out dimensions and measurements and starting to take that idea and make it a reality because that's to me what engineering is all about is taking ideas and actually making them realistic and practical. So they went from originally deciding what it should look like to okay what scale can it be. We kind of joke we want it to be taller than the tallest basketball player on Purdue so we ensured that it's definitely taller than Matt Harbs. More recently what's the details you know how do we get the coins to go into the right spot. The students themselves came up with the ideas of we could add to it actually add sound. So we really wanted to make something super different and an experience that somebody wouldn't normally have when they're just going up to a normal penny press in any other place and since we're Purdue we want to put an engineering spin on it and we want to involve electronics we want to make it look as cool as we possibly can. So we have an entire circuit board that we custom designed to fit everything that we're doing. The way it works is basically we have a penny and it breaks this IR beam here and this controller triggers both lights and sound. So if you take your penny and go and it's rolling down a shoot past the sensor it'll just go straight through there and you hear the fight song. Epic originally stood for engineering projects and community service so we're working with predominantly nonprofit agencies in the Lafayette area but around the world also designing and building projects that help with those organizations mission. In this case it's a little different. We added this to an existing team that had some experience in building and electronics and just said let's build something for Purdue that will help with the Susgrove Sentinel. There were four main images that we decided to select. One was 150th this being a very special year for Purdue we had to do something with that. The rest of these three images we actually decided based off of a couple student polls that we sent out last semester we really wanted the students to have a voice. The most popular ones were the engineering fountain, the Purdue bell tower which also says 150 years and lastly but definitely not least we have one penny that commemorates the 50th moon landing. It's something physical but it's not too big it's not too little it's just a penny. At the same time it's gonna have that design whatever you choose on it and so hopefully it's something maybe you could care on your pocket display on a shelf and just be that little reminder of Purdue. I hope when they walk up to it that they kind of feel like they're standing underneath the bell tower maybe it'll bring them back to their experience at Purdue walking by the bell tower and kind of remind them of their days at school. I think it's all about reminiscing on the past and also reflecting on where you are now how you got here and how Purdue played into that journey. It's only 51 cents to get one probably the cheapest souvenir at Purdue. I think a lot of people enjoy just collecting some.