If you think you need to be a renowned engineer to bring to the world some innovative and technically sound gizmos, you are mistaken. This list of top 20 students’ inventions will make you forget the machines coming of the Matrix and James Bond 007.
How about a washing machine that requires neither water nor detergents? Back in 2005, two Industrial Design students from the National University of Singapore grabbed the Design Lab Award at the international Electrolux Design Lab 2005 competition for developing a waterfall-inspired washing machine.
Instead of using water, the Airwash used negative ions, compressed air and deodorants to clean clothes. The unit was able to clean dirt and bacteria with nature’s own weapon.
The 50-pound prototype spacesuit was developed by students from five North Dakota colleges in a mutual mission that received $100,000 in funding from NASA. The spacesuit comprises three innovative technologies. The other notable features are oxygen and carbon dioxide detectors, GPS system, full suite of health monitors, shoulder mounted CCD cam, Bluetooth server to synchronize all the data, and a potent transmitter for sending the information back to the ground. Although it was a great project but the team of forty students forgot to include the “escape hatch” facility.
A few crazy students at Michigan Technological University crafted a grotesque snow horn, which is fully loaded with tweeters, mid-range drivers, and subwoofers and was amplified to 20,000 watts. The arrangement is powered by 9 Behringer EP2500’s and 1 Crown XLS602.
Making such an impressive system was itself an art. But still the team added non-snow speakers to the setup, which automatically disqualified them from the competition. Are they really disqualified? What do you say?
Students from the Young Defense Scientists Program created this color-changing uniform each and received S$1,000 scholarship and S$200 book voucher. The uniform that can blend into the surroundings is based on Electrochromism. The two school students used a special kind of material that can change colors for the purpose. It is claimed to become a key defence strategy used by soldiers.
Students at the Duke University have created a prototype Wisdom Door that uses biometric information to decide who enters. The door does not make you to stop and identify yourself, but it has nine different sensors that gather enough information about you to identify who you are. At the top of the door is an ultrasonic sensor that beams a signal downward. The beam bounces off your head and this delivers your height to the system. Another four infrared sensors are mounted in the door jams that provide a measurement of girth. Finally there are four load sensors in the floor of the door that tell the system the weight of the person who passes through it. The system looks good but it also has its own limitations that are like what if a lady passes the door wearing high heels or a person with a heavy coat.
In an attempt to have an intelligent approach to fight tick-borne diseases, three engineering students at the Virginia Military Institute have devised a robot that kills ticks. The tick-exterminator robot is similar to automatic lawn-mowing and scours yards for ticks and nabs them with its pesticide-laced denim skirt.
A team comprising three students named Matthew Webster, John Vernon, and ShengZhu Wu developed a robotic drummer dubbed Monster for their final year group project at Leeds Met. Their intriguing system functions utilizing universal MIDI that allows connection to MIDI controllers and also sequencer software.
Two students, one from engineering background and the other from architecture, have successfully created the world’s first display made of transparent concrete. The screen is made of concrete that features entrenched optical fibres, which are able of passing on natural as well as artificial light.
A team of students at the University of Waterloo has designed this touchscreen smart mirror. The device is capable of playing music, and video other than allowing the users to place widgets on the screen.
This has been made using Lego Mindstorms, scissors, and some scrap metal as a project by two friends studying at UC Berkeley. This ingenious Lego machine dispenses, folds, and then cuts toilet paper for you. Is there really no limit to what you can craft using Lego?
If this device dubbed Dishmaker, which is created by an MIT student Leonardo Bonanni, meets realism, it won’t let you worry about the dishes again. The nifty device can restore dishes all in all by making cups, bowls and plates on demand and recycling them when you’re done.
The concept is straight-forward to control a robotic arm via a modified Playstation controller. The concept was given the real shape by a team of college students from ‘The Universidad La Salle Campus’ in Guadalajara, Mexico. The robotic arm can work effectively both in the automatic and manual mode. Its 3 stepper motors and 2 servo motors are controlled by a parallax microcontroller.
Dhananjay Gadre of the Netaji Subhas Institute of Technology, India has developed this cool LED hourglass, which is in actual a 3D version of its real-life counterpart. The LED hourglass, in its current condition, can imitate falling sand. He has plans to incorporate even better LED lighting pattern to hem in the entire thing in a perpex tube thereby enabling superior presentation. Check out the prototype in action.
Some students at the University of Washington have developed a new autonomous submersible dubbed Deepglider. This submarine is capable of reaching depths of nearly 9,000 feet. The submersible is claimed to help in studying the climatic change under the ocean surface. The machine’s first trip also revealed unexpected warming of water near the ocean floor. Scientists now are interested in learning that whether this unexpected rise in temperature has anything to do with global warming.
To commemorate the Espera Sbarro design school’s 20th anniversary, the students have ventured with French television’s ‘Turbo’ car show to build the Turbo S20 Barchetta concept car. The team had twenty students and the concept model was developed in just 120 days and was shown at the recently held Geneva Auto Show.
The 1150kg vehicle runs on a Mercedes Benz 5.0L V8 engine and is mated to a five-speed gearbox to produce 350hp. In order to cut down the total costs, the students took the components from other cars like they lifted the taillights and interior pieces from the Fiat Seicento and Smart Roadster.
Carl Dietrich, a MIT aeronautical-engineering student shows a new spin on the concept of flying cars and has christened his tempting vehicle ‘roadable aircraft.’ He hopes to make this concept meet realism by 2010 and the price tag attached to it will be about $150,000. It really looks quite exhilarating. You could be flying over the traffic jams at a swift speed within a few years from now. But, such flying cars will be the cup of tea for uber-rich only.
A couple of MIT students have changed their room into an awesome disco. Well, they have set-up a full-blown dorm room automation system that boasts voice activation, web control, touch screen controllers, a security system, fingerprint scanner, automatic blinds, and screens with news feeds. All this inclusions are controlled by “MIDAS” controller which they built themselves.
Gone are the days of CDs and DVDs. Sainul Abideen, 24, of the Muslim Educational Society Engineering College, India, has developed a paper based storage system that can store 90-450 GB on a single disk. The secret behind his ‘Rainbow Versatile Disk’ (RVD) is that instead of using zeros and ones for computing he used common geometric shapes such as circles, squares, triangles, which are combined with different colors to preserve the data in the images. The format can then be read by a scanner. In the demo given by this young man he demonstrated 432 pages of foolscap and a 45-inch video clip read from a 4-sq inch piece of ordinary paper. He is also working on a SIM-card-sized Rainbow Data card for mobile phones capable of carrying 5GB data.
The YES2 project is undertaken by more than 400 students from Europe and around the world. The satellite is scheduled to be launched by a Soyuz rocket in September 2007. This mission will piggyback on ESA’s Foton-M3 microgravity mission. The most important aspect of this student project is the deployment of a 30KM long structure into space.
A high school student Thiago Olson successfully built a Nuclear Fusion Reactor at his home. Olson spent two years to look for parts and hardware stuff such as High-voltage X-ray transformer, neutron bubble dosimeter etc. on eBay. Olson’s nuclear reactor is pretty bad-ass, producing 200 million-degree plasma at its core - or, as Olson points out, ’several times hotter than the core of the sun. I think it’s the right time I should start the rough work to make a nuclear reactor on my own. Just kidding guys!
