College of Engineering and Science

Harris Student Design Center

The new, state of the art Harris Student Design Center (HSDC) at Florida Tech (Seen in Figure 2) provides space for students to work on all their design and manufacturing related projects. The 12,000-square-foot, single story building serves the College of Engineering and Science students working on projects from freshman design to senior design projects and everything in between. Student teams fabricate and assemble a variety of projects, from unmanned submersibles, Baja and Formula vehicles to rockets.

At the Harris Student Design Center, students have access to advanced tools, such as virtual reality simulators, CNC machines, soldering stations, electronic programming tools, waterjet, plasma, and laser cutters and engravers, etc.

The Harris Student Design Center or as is commonly known, PANTHER-WORKS can handle a variety of projects of multiple shapes, sizes, and types. Five specialized rooms have been set up for various project tasks like electronic soldering, computer programming, subtractive manufacturing, computer-aided design, virtual reality, and ideation.

The high bay production area provides ample space to host large projects like our Formula, Baja, and marine vessels. This area offers more than a dozen fully equipped workstations that include various mechanical hand and power tools. In addition to the available tools, the HSDC has a welding station, an enclosed spray booth and a 2.5 ton overhead crane.

As an integral part of our academic commitment, the Student Design Center closely works with other on-campus maker groups and labs such as the Digital Scholarship Lab, the Makerspace, and machine shop.

Design Center Features:

• Workstations with space for project layout and construction, storage, and tools.
• Flexible welding area with 'tig' and 'big' welding, equipped with directional specific ventilation
• Overhead crane to 2 tonnes for large project handling
• Paint spray booth, featuring high flow ventilation and breathing air for one operator
• 2 Large Format Laser Cutter
• 4 Independent Axes - Hotwire CNC
• CNC Plasma Cutter
• Proto-MAX WaterJet
• High Voltage Workbench
• Electronics Assembly and Soldering
• Electronic Prototyping Room
• Tormach 440 CNC Machine
• Computer Aided Design Room
• FORM 2 SLA Printer
• Direct to Fabric Printer
• Large format poster printer
• Embroidery Machine
• Ideation Room/Teleconference Room

*Students who want to work in the: HSDC, Makerspace and Machine Shop should complete "Hand and Power Tools –Electric”  Training which can be found at https://support.fit.edu/vividlms/