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yaksha42WARNING: Below post is very long and most likely very boring. It goes over what happened today at the Project Fair.
I woke up at 4AM. Took a shower and got dressed. Left the apartment around 5AM headed to the school for the Project Fair. When I got to the school, it was a little after 5 and the doors to the lab was still locked. We were told it would be open at 5. I waited a few more minutes, then got out my keys I had for the downstairs labs to see if they would work on these labs. They did, so sure enough me and a few other people headed in to begin setup.
I had printed out 100 of the pamphlets and the block/flow diagram. I got a few other things set up while I waited for the others to show up. Everyone was in by 5:15. We had heard that Channel 3 News was going to be there, we were pretty excited with the prospect of being on TV. We got everything set up correctly, did a few little neat things to make our project space look nice. Matthew brought candy to attract people.
So the news arrived. The only problem, they didn't bring a cord long enough to reach all the projects, only a few, and ours wasn't one of them. The one they showed on the news was basically a joke to most of the people in our class. While most of us had spent a lot of time working on our projects, these people simply made a switch that had cameras mounted on the back of a motorcycle, whichever way the switch was pushed (representing the blinker on a bike) the camera would come on. While this is a very marketable project, it's not an applied project that we were supposed to do. So, getting up at 4AM and hoping to get on TV was all a bust. We had until 9AM before anyone else would arrive. So we tweaked the project a bit, talked, walked around and just killed time.
9 o'clock. People start coming in to see the projects. Mostly students and friends of people who had projects. We spent the time busily explaining our project, how it worked, and what it was good for.
Here is how the project works, if you already know, or this kind of thing bores you, skip this paragraph :-p Our project is the Self Controlled Automated Home. In a nutshell, you can control different devices in your house using a phone. We had a model house that Eric built, a phone and phone simulator, the DTMF to HEX decoder, and the HC11 microprocessor. In order to operate it, you call into the circuit to a special chip that "answers" the phone after two rings. Once it answers, whenever you press a button, the DTMF signals (which are unique for every number on a phone), are converted to a HEX number. These numbers are fed into the HC11. In order to be able to actually turn on and off devices, you need to enter the Admin Password on the phone first. For demonstration purposes, we just had it as 1 2 3 4 (Amazing! I have the same combination on my luggage!). After that, there was a total of 18 possible codes. There were 8 different devices plugged into the HC11. 8 of the codes were used to turn on these devices one at a time, 8 more were used to turn off the devices one at a time. Two more were used for a "master on" and "master off." They turn on or off all of the devices. We had a few different devices plugged in. One thing we had was a fan representing an air conditioner. This could be useful if you were coming home from work and you wanted to come home to a nice cool house. Simply call in, turn on the AC on your way home, and the house will be cooled when you get home. This saves energy from leaving the AC on all day. We also had a normal desk lamp, this showed that we could in fact turn on a 120V device by controlling it with the HC11. So, once you get the devices on/off according to your specifications, you press * and hang up the phone.
So to break it down:
It's just that simple.
So, we give our demonstration to quite a few people, most people seemed to enjoy the project ... either that or the candy. But we heard some very nice comments from people.
Then the judges started coming around. These are people who work in the industry we're trying to get into. I think we really impressed them. They all enjoyed the project, we answered their questions quickly and with some very good answers. Now it was time to wait.
There are seven awards. People's Choice, Teacher's Choice, Most Marketable, Most Technical, Most Effort, Honorable Mention, and Best Overall.
It was 4PM. After a lot of explaining our project, it was time to go and see who won the awards.
First award, People's Choice. How this works: when people go into the Project Fair, they're given a ballot. Each Project has a number, and the people write down the number of their favorite project. What we did: We grabbed a some blank ballets and put our number on them. Whenever anyone walked to our project, we asked if they would exchange their ballot with one that had our number on it. Sort of ensuring our vote. Well, because a lot of the ballots in the box were the same color pen (red) and the same handwriting, we were accused (though not directly) of ballot stuffing and we were no longer a candidate of People's Choice. While I'm mad at the decision, I can understand it. It probably wasn't the best thing to do, but I really think had we not done this, we would have won People's Choice. Instead, the award went to the Enviro Control 3000. It controls the temperature in different rooms, for those who like it hot and those who like it cold.
Teacher's Choice. The professors pick the project they like the most. They chose the Enviro Control 3000 (see above).
Most Marketable. Which one would do best on the market? This went to a talking yearbook. Pretty cool project actually. Instead of having people write messages, they record them into the book and it can be played back at the touch of a button. You could have 8 different messages, 40 seconds long each.
Most Technical. The most difficult one to put together. This one went to a remote control car jack. Also a pretty cool project. For those not strong enough to jack up a car, just use the remote control. These guys really deserved it I think, they put so much time and effort into it, and had so much stuff go wrong. They literally set a motor on fire.
Most Effort. Enviro Control 3000.
Honorable Mention. "You almost won" award. Went to the automatic dog food eater. I really don't think they should have gotton this, the project, like the motorcycle above, was really a joke. It was a potentiometer that regulated the amount of dog food and a timer that the group bought. They used an electric drill motor (which was very loud) to turn some disks and drop food. Think of those quarter M&M machines.
Best Overall. Now, I was worried. The Enviro Control had already won 3, and I figured that it would pick up this as well. I was also thinking that we had probably been completely knocked out of awards because of above "ballot stuffing." Anyway, they announce the winner, and IT WAS US! We had won the best award! We were all so very happy! Our months of hard work had finally paid off! We got small trophies (other awards got small plaques) and went and got our picture taken with the our project.
We congratulated the other teams. The Enviro Control was our real competition, I was glad we beat them (nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah :-p ). They said that they would trade in all three of their awards if they could have gotton Best Overall, so that made it even more special.
So we took down all the project, Matthew is going to store it at his place, we'll be showing it to the Freshman next semester. I headed home and stopped to see![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
azurelunatic. Little Fayamous was vacuuming. I showed her the trophy, hung around for a bit, then went home to get dressed for work.
VERY LONG DAY. I've been at DeVry for 14 hours. I have another 4 to go. I need to work on my Ethics stuff, blech.
I apologize for this extremely long post, I wonder if anyone will actually read it. Oh well, I was so hyper I just had to type it out.
I woke up at 4AM. Took a shower and got dressed. Left the apartment around 5AM headed to the school for the Project Fair. When I got to the school, it was a little after 5 and the doors to the lab was still locked. We were told it would be open at 5. I waited a few more minutes, then got out my keys I had for the downstairs labs to see if they would work on these labs. They did, so sure enough me and a few other people headed in to begin setup.
I had printed out 100 of the pamphlets and the block/flow diagram. I got a few other things set up while I waited for the others to show up. Everyone was in by 5:15. We had heard that Channel 3 News was going to be there, we were pretty excited with the prospect of being on TV. We got everything set up correctly, did a few little neat things to make our project space look nice. Matthew brought candy to attract people.
So the news arrived. The only problem, they didn't bring a cord long enough to reach all the projects, only a few, and ours wasn't one of them. The one they showed on the news was basically a joke to most of the people in our class. While most of us had spent a lot of time working on our projects, these people simply made a switch that had cameras mounted on the back of a motorcycle, whichever way the switch was pushed (representing the blinker on a bike) the camera would come on. While this is a very marketable project, it's not an applied project that we were supposed to do. So, getting up at 4AM and hoping to get on TV was all a bust. We had until 9AM before anyone else would arrive. So we tweaked the project a bit, talked, walked around and just killed time.
9 o'clock. People start coming in to see the projects. Mostly students and friends of people who had projects. We spent the time busily explaining our project, how it worked, and what it was good for.
Here is how the project works, if you already know, or this kind of thing bores you, skip this paragraph :-p Our project is the Self Controlled Automated Home. In a nutshell, you can control different devices in your house using a phone. We had a model house that Eric built, a phone and phone simulator, the DTMF to HEX decoder, and the HC11 microprocessor. In order to operate it, you call into the circuit to a special chip that "answers" the phone after two rings. Once it answers, whenever you press a button, the DTMF signals (which are unique for every number on a phone), are converted to a HEX number. These numbers are fed into the HC11. In order to be able to actually turn on and off devices, you need to enter the Admin Password on the phone first. For demonstration purposes, we just had it as 1 2 3 4 (Amazing! I have the same combination on my luggage!). After that, there was a total of 18 possible codes. There were 8 different devices plugged into the HC11. 8 of the codes were used to turn on these devices one at a time, 8 more were used to turn off the devices one at a time. Two more were used for a "master on" and "master off." They turn on or off all of the devices. We had a few different devices plugged in. One thing we had was a fan representing an air conditioner. This could be useful if you were coming home from work and you wanted to come home to a nice cool house. Simply call in, turn on the AC on your way home, and the house will be cooled when you get home. This saves energy from leaving the AC on all day. We also had a normal desk lamp, this showed that we could in fact turn on a 120V device by controlling it with the HC11. So, once you get the devices on/off according to your specifications, you press * and hang up the phone.
So to break it down:
- Call the S.C.A.H.
- Enter the administrator password
- Enter the codes to turn on/off devices
- Press * to hang up
It's just that simple.
So, we give our demonstration to quite a few people, most people seemed to enjoy the project ... either that or the candy. But we heard some very nice comments from people.
Then the judges started coming around. These are people who work in the industry we're trying to get into. I think we really impressed them. They all enjoyed the project, we answered their questions quickly and with some very good answers. Now it was time to wait.
There are seven awards. People's Choice, Teacher's Choice, Most Marketable, Most Technical, Most Effort, Honorable Mention, and Best Overall.
It was 4PM. After a lot of explaining our project, it was time to go and see who won the awards.
First award, People's Choice. How this works: when people go into the Project Fair, they're given a ballot. Each Project has a number, and the people write down the number of their favorite project. What we did: We grabbed a some blank ballets and put our number on them. Whenever anyone walked to our project, we asked if they would exchange their ballot with one that had our number on it. Sort of ensuring our vote. Well, because a lot of the ballots in the box were the same color pen (red) and the same handwriting, we were accused (though not directly) of ballot stuffing and we were no longer a candidate of People's Choice. While I'm mad at the decision, I can understand it. It probably wasn't the best thing to do, but I really think had we not done this, we would have won People's Choice. Instead, the award went to the Enviro Control 3000. It controls the temperature in different rooms, for those who like it hot and those who like it cold.
Teacher's Choice. The professors pick the project they like the most. They chose the Enviro Control 3000 (see above).
Most Marketable. Which one would do best on the market? This went to a talking yearbook. Pretty cool project actually. Instead of having people write messages, they record them into the book and it can be played back at the touch of a button. You could have 8 different messages, 40 seconds long each.
Most Technical. The most difficult one to put together. This one went to a remote control car jack. Also a pretty cool project. For those not strong enough to jack up a car, just use the remote control. These guys really deserved it I think, they put so much time and effort into it, and had so much stuff go wrong. They literally set a motor on fire.
Most Effort. Enviro Control 3000.
Honorable Mention. "You almost won" award. Went to the automatic dog food eater. I really don't think they should have gotton this, the project, like the motorcycle above, was really a joke. It was a potentiometer that regulated the amount of dog food and a timer that the group bought. They used an electric drill motor (which was very loud) to turn some disks and drop food. Think of those quarter M&M machines.
Best Overall. Now, I was worried. The Enviro Control had already won 3, and I figured that it would pick up this as well. I was also thinking that we had probably been completely knocked out of awards because of above "ballot stuffing." Anyway, they announce the winner, and IT WAS US! We had won the best award! We were all so very happy! Our months of hard work had finally paid off! We got small trophies (other awards got small plaques) and went and got our picture taken with the our project.
We congratulated the other teams. The Enviro Control was our real competition, I was glad we beat them (nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah :-p ). They said that they would trade in all three of their awards if they could have gotton Best Overall, so that made it even more special.
So we took down all the project, Matthew is going to store it at his place, we'll be showing it to the Freshman next semester. I headed home and stopped to see
azurelunatic. Little Fayamous was vacuuming. I showed her the trophy, hung around for a bit, then went home to get dressed for work.VERY LONG DAY. I've been at DeVry for 14 hours. I have another 4 to go. I need to work on my Ethics stuff, blech.
I apologize for this extremely long post, I wonder if anyone will actually read it. Oh well, I was so hyper I just had to type it out.
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Date: 2003-02-20 10:19 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-02-20 09:27 pm (UTC)