The annual UWaterloo  Electrical and Computer Engineering Design Symposium took place today at the school’s Davis Centre in Waterloo. Having had my turn at the Design Symposium last year, I was really interested to see what students have come up with this time.  I had a chance to look around at the projects and talk with these students and I am really impressed with all they’ve done. There was a ton of innovation on display today.

I had a great time talking with all these bright students. I spent so much time talking to them that I only got around to seeing about 50% of all the booths! It was really interesting to find out how to put their systems together and I learned so much from the short exhibition time.

Read on to see some of the projects.

What it is: A bulb that doubles as a speaker system. It connects to your computer over a wifi network and you can control the audio and lighting. The bulb can be set to act as a strobe light which flashes in tune with the music. Eric and his team members designed their own board with audio processors, LED controllers and wifi chip. They did all the driver development themselves too, not a trivial task! Local TV did an interview with the Audio Bulb group.

What it is: Wallace has a wireless body motion analyzer strapped to his arm. This arduino-based device gathers movement data via accelerometers and other sensors in the box. The movement data is recorded and can be used to compare the similarity between movement.

What it is: Close up shot of the wireless body motion analyzer.

What it is: An ultrasonic sensor system. Using an array of ultrasonic sensors, these students created a system to track an object with an ultrasonic emitter. Looks like they used Echo-Dist’s old hardware (a previous design project from 2009)!

What it is: “Borgified” Matt is showing off the Gaze Acquisition Platform. An infrared sensor tracks the wearer’s eye movements, and a second camera provides a video feed to overlay the target information. So this system can track everything you are looking at. Cool.

What it is: Named the “Touch-Me” system, this project is very similar to the Microsoft Surface. It provides a multi-touch surface for playing games and using other applications. It uses a Playstation eye camera modified for infrared input. The projector they were using looked very familiar – and indeed it was the projector from my own design project!

What it is: Project Iris is an imaging system attached to a weather ballon. The system is supposed to snap photos of the ground from way up. Scott and his team have drafted a flight plan and have clearance to launch in the coming weeks.

What it is: Active Targeting and Tracking weapon. This device will track your face and headshot you with a nerf gun.

What it is: USB bike. This bike has a usb port to charge your device as you bike.

What it is: Kickboxer pro. An automated system used for kick boxing practice. (Sorry I didn’t get a pic of this one!) They won the Infusion Cup prize of $2000!

]]> http://danhadi.com/blog/?feed=rss2&p=891 6 http://danhadi.com/blog/?p=887 http://danhadi.com/blog/?p=887#comments Wed, 17 Mar 2010 02:59:36 +0000 Dan http://danhadi.com/blog/?p=887

Today I had my last Integrated Chinese 101 class. It was great! Tài hǎo le! (Great!)

Ken and I took the non-credit course from the Confucius Institute at Renison College (UW). We learned several basic Mandarin phrases and sentence structure. By the end of the course, I could write a page long letter (in Chinese characters) to our instructor. I was really impressed by the amount that I learned! Of course, it’s all very basic, but definitely a great start.

I have to say that the classic rainbow Apple does look a lot better on the white plastic than it did on my aluminum PowerBook. And unlike the previous mod on my PowerBook, this rainbow logo was just a clear sticker that is applied to the exterior of the iBook case. Easily applied and easy to remove.

My sister was afraid people would think she was “full of pride”, but as far as I know it’s still stuck on her iBook.

Snapshot of the redesigned firststarprint.com

Design Decisions

A couple weeks ago, I started working on this FSP web project again. Web design and coding is not my forté (see snapshot of old page on right), so I knew I wanted the new site to be powered by some sort of content management system (CMS).

I tried out an install of Drupal and was playing with the configuration and settings over a number of weeks. Drupal is great. It’s an open source project, so there is a plethora of modules and add-ons for the system. It’s very powerful and is built to support community-based websites with many users. Although using Drupal seemed like overkill for a small website project, I was attracted to the ability to add new modules and new functionality whenever required. Maybe FSP would need an e-commerce system later, so I wanted to be prepared.

Over time, I began to notice one thing – despite its positive attributes, Drupal was SLOW. It seemed that calls from Durpal to the database on our host, iPower, were extremely slow (sometimes 3.6 sec per request). I tried performing some repairs on the database, but the results were still not optimal.  I’m not sure if it was my configuration, or some combination of the company’s web host set up, but I just couldn’t get Drupal to speed up.

In the meantime, I was also playing with an install of WordPress. WordPress’ simplicity and familiarity were good points. It also has a collection of plugins and themes that would allow for customizations. Although e-commerce would be out of the picture, WordPress seemed to suit out needs for the time being. Mainly, I needed something to serve a few pages and be easy to add new content. Although it was a little slower than having static html pages, it was no where near as slow as Drupal. So WordPress it is! Currently, the content on the FSP is a bit sparse, but that can easily be added over time. There was an urgency to get the outdated material out, and emphasize a focus on custom apparel printing.