My World

Five Months Later!!!

I have been itching to post for a long time now, and finally full with scratches I would do it.

Although its been five months since my last post here, I have been part of our group blog thing. Till now its been dominated by Mr. AA's views, much like the Indian batting line up was did by Tendulkar not long ago.
By the way, Happy Birthday to him! Hoping he would recover soon enough to play the tests in the Windies.

This saturday we had the Open House demos of projects in our college. There were many interesting projects on display. The visitors were from different backgrounds - professors, college students, school kids, families (on a technological picnic if you will).

As I had also put up my B.Tech Project on show (which I would skip explaining), I could not take out time to visit all the departments. The only place I did manage to go was Mechanical. They had chosen the lawns to display all their projects and were appreciably crowded. Many of their projects were implementaion of small smart ideas. For example one group had removed the electrical motor from the washing machine and installed a bicycle instead. So set a timer of 5 min. on your clock, and pedal yourself to a healthier and cleaner future. One thing to be taken care of is to not wear clothes while cycling, because you'll sweat and always end up with a set of smelly clothes, which you would need to wash in your washing machine, but again mess up another set.

Two very interesting toilet projects caught everyone's attention. One was a urinal with springs, so that when the 'pissed user' leaves, the decrease in weight on the springs triggers the flush. That would be a lot cheaper than shadow sensors (or whatever else installed in current 'fancy' urinals)

Yet another interesting project had improved the toilet seat by adding an extra flush button. So now you have High and Low knobs on your toilet seat!!! Use these knobs depending on what and how much you ate last night... =))
This is not making fun of the idea which would actually save a lot of water. Hoping this one does not go down the flush!

OK, much of this toilet humour... The most useful project I saw was in my own department. This was being developed for last two semesters by four 3rd year students. In association with the National Association for Blind (NAB), they have developed a cane for the blind which had two very useful features:

1. It would warn (by vibrating) of any obstruction within 3 mts. range of the person using the cane.
   
2. It would help them to easily identify the bus they want to board. With a small device mounted on DTC buses, the cane would just identify the bus no. and the speaker on the cane would call out the bus no. If more than one bus is approaching, the user just needs to press the select button as soon as the bus he needs to board is called out on his cane, then the speaker on the bus would buzz and help the person to track the door. The implementation was carried out with constant feedback with the future users, so that it turns out to be useful. Now they would be used by the people from NAB to suggest any customizations.

There were a lot more projects and interested people can visit the official site.

Overall the Open House was quite successful, and if you are a technocrat you may have had a nice time here. There were projects for all kinds of people (since EVERYONE uses a toilet). Although some were meant for a very select intellectual group of visitors (like my project :D), and hardly had any visitors.

Being somewhat of an engineer I enjoyed the day, ofcourse the free lunch helped.

posted by kaushal @ 11:37 AM