Entries in Category Engineering and Inventions

The Pipe Crawler—A Hit in Poland?

One of my recent google searches about pipe-crawling robots brought up this link, which appears to be a translation into Polish of some of the documents I wrote about my senior engineering project. It includes pictures from both the pipe crawler web page and the final report we submited to our professors. I should thank ... er ... somebody, though I'm not exactly sure who. They appear to be a lab or research institute of some kind. Well, thanks for the translation anyway!

I'd also like to take a few words here to insist that my friends Sheraz Wasi and Mark Miller be credited as co-authors of the Pipe Crawler work. It seems like my name is the only one that gets attached to it anymore, because I wrote and hosted the web page about it, and that's not fair; both of them toiled away in the robot lab from morning to midnight just as I did. By the way, this is not a criticism of my new Polish friends—many web sites and email correspondents get the impression that I was the only author simply because the page happens to be hosted at www.eikimartinson.com, and this seems like a good opportunity to set the record straight.

LED Mortarboards—Technology Marches On!

I would like to bring to the attention of my readers an impressive technological advance made by one David Worden, lately graduated from the University of Wisconsin with a well-deserved degree in Electrical Engineering. Mr. Worden enlivened his graduation ceremony with a light show built into his mortarboard: 64 LEDs driven by a microcontroller programmed to produce a variety of animated effects. Let me be the first to congratulate Mr. Worden on his splendid achievement in Mad Science—but as a Mad Scientist myself, let me also remind the young upstart that he was not the first to have this idea!

In the long-past days of my miss-spent youth (err … 2004), I also graduated with a degree in Electrical Engineering, and sported a light-show hat of my own at the ceremony. The mortarboard had four diagonal lines of 8 white LEDs each, controlled by a central PIC microcontroller; all five circuit boards were painted black and atttached to the top of the hat with velcro. Though I must admit, Mr. Worden's design is rather more complex, with twice as many LEDs as mine and a fully-concealed circuit.

Visual Navigation by Looming Simulation

As a small project for my Inventive Thinking class, I worked on a simulation of creatures avoiding each other or performing tasks like crossing a street or forming a swarm. The creatures navigate by choosing simple actions (like turning right or left) based on the "Looming" principle of obstacle avoidance studied by my thesis advisor, among others. The simulation runs in your web browser (Firefox or recent IE have been tested, but probably others as well). You can view it (fun to watch) and play with the parameters to your heart's content at this link: Looming Simulation

Fresh News on Fresh Water

Our desalination project was profiled in FAU's engineering recruitment newsletter, The Pinnacle. Many thanks to them for the recognition.

Also, two conference papers were submitted and accepted, one in Portugal and one by the Conference on Desalination and the Environment in Greece. Should be fun.

As for my desalination thesis, it crawls inexorably toward completion. Call it done by this summer.

The Best Use of PVC Since ...

Another newspaper generously and quite unexpectedly weighed in on our desalination project. The City Link, one of South Florida's A&E weeklies, gave us this Resounding Endorsement:

SUCCESSFUL: Two Florida Atlantic University engineering students' realization of a device that will create cheap, drinkable water for Third World countries. Using PVC pipes, Eikei Martinson and Brandon Moore cobbled together the gadget from inventor Michael Levine's drawing. The desalination device has been named a finalist in the national Collegiate Inventors Competition. This may be the best use of PVC pipe since the bong.

Say it with me, readers: there ain't no such thing as bad publicity.

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