Category Archives: Engineering

National Underwater Robotics Challenge

See the National Underwater Robotics Challenge web site for information on the event in Arizona June 8th through 10th. They offer a remote underwater vehicle kit for $250.

The ROV-IN-A-BOX is intended to help get teams involved that are new to underwater robotics. Buy purchasing this kit, it helps put an inexperienced team, or a team with young students like elementary school kids, into a comfort zone to allow them to take on the Underwater Challenge. It reduces the stress, time and resources needed to acquire all the parts to complete an ROV for the competition. The kit can also be used by a more mature team as a starting point for the ROV they may want to build.

There will be a live video stream June 9 at 8pm MST and will continue to until about 2am MST June 10. The video will come from both the ROV and in the pool with event cameras in and around the submarine. Once the video has been processed and mixed poolside by Arizona State University’s Applied Learning Technologies Institute, it will then be channeled to Chandler High School’s television studio, where it will be broadcast to a view gallery and simultaneously sent to a server at ASU where it will be webcast to the world.

Video of the ROV in a box:
Continue reading →

Inventor TV Shows

I caught some of Everyday Edisons the other day, which looked promising (though I would prefer less fluff and more focus on the process of designing and marketing the products. American Inventor season two premiers tonight on ABC. I saw some of American Inventor last year and it was interesting (though it didn’t grab me enough to get me to watch often). Still compared to the usual TV fair they look interesting and do actually provide some insight into turning ideas into products.

One minor point I find funny and a bit lame. On the Everyday Edisons web site they show a photo with 10 people and then have an image underneath it with text (yes image text like a myspace page – obviously whoever is responsible for this website doesn’t follow the advice of the web usability experts – this image text is just one example, another is that every time you go the home page it starts playing a video with audio – it is annoying to have web sites with so little idea of good web design practices) that states something like “I thought there were 14 inventors, I only see seven. What’s up?” The image actually shows 10 people – not 7, what is up with someone that only sees 7?

Related: Engineering Education Reality TV (which I also note web usability failings) – Help Choose the New PBS Science Program – Japan Project X: Innovators Documentaries
Continue reading →

S&P 500 CEOs – Again Engineering Graduates Lead

2006 Data from Spencer Stuart on S&P 500 CEO (pdf document) shows once again more have bachelors degrees in engineering than any other field.

Field		% of CEOs
Engineering		23%
Economics		13%
Business Administration		12%
Liberal Arts		8%
Accounting		8%
No degree or no data		3%

This data only shows the data for 65% of CEOs, I would like to see the rest of the data but it is not provide in this report. 41% of S&P CEOs have MBAs. 27% have other advanced degrees.

Engineering Graduate Job Market

Employers find there are few graduating engineers left to hire as dot-com debacle of five years ago fades into history by Mark Savage, Cornell University:

Average B.S.-level salaries for engineering graduates, which had dropped by 10 percent to $52,503 in 2002 from $56,072 in 2001, grew slowly. By 2006 (the most recent year for which validated data is available), salaries had finally surpassed 2001 levels with starting salaries averaging about $57,000 and $66,000, respectively, for engineering undergraduate and master’s degree graduates.
…
the marketable skills that engineering graduates bring to the workplace are also of strong interest to a broad range of industries and functions not typically associated with engineering, from consulting and financial services to sales and marketing. Nearly 50 percent of Cornell’s engineering students embrace these nontraditional career paths.

To be sure, these students are eager to use their technical skills, but they want to practice them in a business applications environment, often found in the financial services or consulting sectors. They are less attracted to the traditional “hard core” engineering roles that defined engineering graduates a generation ago. Thus, it is not surprising to find IBM Business Consulting Services, Goldman-Sachs and Capital One standing alongside Microsoft, Lockheed Martin and General Electric among the top 10 employers of Cornell engineering graduates.

Engineering graduates continue to receive excellent salary offers, as I have mentioned previously: Highest paying college degrees. And don’t forget more S&P 500 CEOs are Engineering graduates than are graduates of any other discipline.

Making Robots from Trash

Mr. Woo creates robots (in China) using trash – without any formal education. Cool engineering – who needs Lego Mindstorms? Not Woo.

Video of the Falkirk Wheel Canal Lift

3 minute movie of the Video of the Falkirk Wheel Canal Lift.

Awesome Cat Cam

CatCam - photo of the famous cat photographer CatCam - cat photographer on the run CatCam - cat photographer get picture of another cat

CatCam by Juergen Perthold – this great project involved taking a digital camera and some additional equipment to create a camera that his cat wore around his neck which took pictures every 3 minutes. The pictures are great. The cat got photos of several other cats and seemed to like cars.

See more cool gadgets, See our other popular posts and our cat related posts.

Sometimes I have some challenging ideas, or crazy like some other people would say. This time I thought about our cat who is the whole day out, returning sometimes hungry sometimes not, sometimes with traces of fights, sometimes he stay also the night out. When he finally returns, I wonder where he was and what he did during his day. This brought me to the idea to equip the cat with a camera. The plan was to put a little camera around his neck which takes every few minutes a picture. After he is returning, the camera would show his day.
…
The VistaQuest made it very easy for me, because it is able to supply my circuit also if switched off. This is because of an internal DC/DC converter which boosts the voltage from the 1.5V battery to 3.3V. The DC/DC converter is always working because of the internal SRAM which holds the pictures. I just had to hook the microcontroller to the internal camera supply.
…
Well, I thought the hardest part is done by developing the software and soldering the controller board. But it is more the housing to protect the camera. You can not imagine what kind of requirements have to be fulfilled if you want to equip your cat with a camera. I built a small housing out of plastic plates and put it on the collar of the cat for evaluation purpose. This housing was last seen as the cat walked out of the door… Probably the wires I used for attaching were not strong enough. Or someone released the cat from the interesting looking piece.

For the second try I used the plastic package of a child toy (Kinderueberraschung), put a stone in it for loading it with some weight and attached it again to the cat collar. This time the part returned – dirty and scratched outside, water inside. What the hell is the cat doing !? This raised the requirements for the camera protective housing a lot
…
Big moment no. 1: attach the collar with the camera to the cat. The reaction was not very happy but finally accepted. Reality check passed 🙂

This is my favorite home engineering project. The concept is great. The explanation of the technology is great. The adjustment to real life situations is great. The end result (the photos) is great. This wins the non-existent Curious Cat Cool Contraption award. If someone doesn’t start selling prefabricated cat cameras I will be very surprised (if I was more enterprising I would do it myself). Maybe J. Perthold will, in any event he should inspire many to try making their own.

BumpZee Science and Engineering Communities

Bumpzee communities provide topic focused blog feeds, tools for blogs and more. I have created communities for science and for engineering. They offer some of the common tools such as highlighting posts community members have voted up (bumped). Blog owners can add there blogs to bumpzee and the communities. Bumpzee offers tools to track blog statistics (others offer similar things, of course, for example: mybloglog, google analytics, feedburner) with interactive features (like showing what Bumpzee members are viewing the blog, most popular posts on your blog, most poplular posts in your community…).

Winter Air Refrigeration

From Freeaire:

“Free Cooling” In colder climates, the Freeaire taps into the greatest source of refrigeration ever created: winter. The Freeaire can use cold outside air to cool the space, simply using what Nature has so kindly made available, to give the entire compressor system a winter vacation.
…
In cold climates, this innovative option allows you to utilize a natural resource we have in abundance up here in the North: outside winter air. Rather than relying on the compressor system to produce cold air it simply moves the cold from outside to inside, using just a fraction of the energy.

Seems like a smart idea to me. Their systems are for large walk in freezers.

Lego Autopilot First Flight

Chris Anderson continues his progress with the sub $1,000 autonomous flight vehicle (using lego mindstorms at the core). He has created a site to track the progress and provide information resources to others: DIY Drones. Very cool.

Lego autopilot first flight:

My kids and I actually had the first successful test flight of the sub-$1,000 UAV two weekends ago, but I haven’t had time to edit the video properly until now. The good news is that a) it didn’t crash, and b) it works. We tested stabilization, autonomous navigation (only using compass headings this time, although GPS is in the works), and the real-time video downlink. Everything worked well enough that we’re able to see what we have to improve, which is the definition of a successful test.
…
The main aim of this project is to both make the world’s cheapest full-featured UAV and the first one designed to be within the reach of high school and below kids, as a platform for an aerial robotics contest. Like the Lego FIRST league, but in the air.