What are cats?

Have you ever had problems understanding cats?

Here is a quick tutorial made by one of our fellow engineers about cats, what resources they require, what activities they have to accomplish and how you can use them.

The future of displays

   The future of displays is about only making them smaller, lighter, more durable and more colorful, but also about making them FLEXIBLE! Watch this video to understand more about the matter.

 

The first computer, out of LEGO!

   A replica of the first ever computer, made by the greeks, which dates from aprox. 100 BC has been rebuilt, from LEGO! It's amazing to see a piece of ancient engineering brought back to life in an entertaining yet serious and practical form. Enjoy the video!

Iron man suit, soon, in a store near you..

   Never thought an Iron Man suit is possible? Just wait a few more years for this company to build it and you could have one. Congratulations on the XOS 2 suit and good luck with the new version!

Engineers, proving the improbable

   This is what engineering is about. When skilled engineers gather and set their minds and efforts into one idea then anything can happen.

   A true engineer should never think something is impossible, he should always consider any idea to be at most improbable, at that time.

The truth about engineers

   If you didn't know this by now, here is the truth about, but only a small part of it, about engineers!

  

Anatomy of a Computer Virus

   It's truly amazing what the Internet offers these days. All the knowledge required to hack a system is out there. You just have to have a little information and a bit of curiosity combined with ambition and anything is possible.

LOL of the day

LOL of the day

    

   Dedicated to all my friends that graduate today from our university's Computer Science faculty.

How to achieve infinite power! (option 2)

   How many times haven't you been in the situation where your laptop battery is running low and you have nowhere to charge it? Now there is a solution!

   The USB Laptop self-charger cable! You'll "NEVER" run out of power!

Notice: In case your laptop shuts down even with the USB Laptop-self charger than your laptop battery is dead.

Notice 2.0: This is a joke!

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What happens when an engineer owns a dog

   Are you an engineer? Do you have a pet and you're worried it will mess up the house while you're gone? Keep your pet occupied, just like this fellow engineer did.

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Agrotech 3.0

Agrotech 3.0 event Logo

   A few months ago, I was lucky enough to be picked to be a participant at an international engineering event organised by BEST Madrid.

   The BEST group is a europeean group made out of students that organise a lot of activities across major cities around the old continent. 

   The event at which I had participated took place in Madrid, at the Polytechnical University of Madrid.

   

    The event consisted in making a robot which gathered solar and wind energy as effieciently as possible. In order to build our robot we had to use parts from LEGO Mindstorms. We could only use a maximum of two NXT Intelligent Bricks, two ultrasonic sensors, and as many light, touch and sound sensors as we wanted.

NXT Intelligent Brick

Light sensor

Ultrasonic sensor

Sound sensor

Touch sensor

 
   Our robots also had to be equipped with an Energy meter that was connected to the solar panel and to the wind-driven motor.

Energy meter with battery, connected to a Mindstorms solar panel

   The robots had to travel autonomously on a three level course with ramps connecting each level, carefully avoiding clifs and holes. Also, on every level there was a patch of grass that the robots should have detected and consider the area between patches of grass as being a road.


    The robots had to avoid obstacles, detect the position of the energy source and move twoards it and try to find the optimum position for charging. After finding that position they had to be able to adapt if the position of the energy source was changed and to find again the optimum spot. While in that optimum spot, the robots had to charge for 90 seconds and then move on to find the next source.


   The course was layed out so that on the second level there was a fan that was the wind energy source and on the third level there was a light projector as the light source.


   The winning robot was the one who could charge the energy-meter the most, had the smallest weight and was the "most atonomous" (the one that didn't require to be moved or changed by hand).


   Me and my team (Andrea Zsohár, Alexopoulou Vicky, Miguel Laguens Vega) have built and programmed the robot using the LEJOS framework and programming in Java. Our little robot was called RoboJamón and he did a really nice job on the course. 

The team

Deploying the robot

Moving forward to find energy

It's working great!

Charging with solar and wind energy

There's a little problem with stopping the robot...

    He had only a few problems while finding the optimum spot to charge with energy (because we didn't set the threshold high enough). It was a fantastic experience and a great opportunity to work with a NEW and FUN technology.


   Thank you again to the BEST team in Madrid for the course and the opportunity that they gave us, to LEARN and to HAVE FUN. I highly recommend to any student that studies in Europe to look for his closest BEST group and apply for the next Agrotech course or for any other course.


   Courses are organised once every season (spring, summer, autumn and winter) and you only have to pay the transportation to the location of the event. Everything else is covered by the organisers.

   In the end I will post the official video of the event with a few of the most important moments in the competition. I hope you enjoyed this post and I have made you curious about the BEST oportunities!

 

   Please feel free to leave any comments on this post, to rate it and share it with the world. I'll be back later with more interesting and funny things about the Engineering world!

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How to have a COOL Summer

   When summer comes it's hard to keep engineering and to keep COOL too. That's why I use one of the best, most efficient, and low-cost solution. Kepp airCOOLed like me with one of these air conditioners.

   I bought one of these little things a few weeks ago and it's absoluetly perfect for any situation.

   Also, a room mate bought for himself another kind of air conditioner wich is even better and more portable!

   You have no idea how good and efficient these little air conditioners are until you have tried them.
   Keep COOL and keep on engineering my friends! (just like this guy)

COOLed Enigneer

Exam! Expectation vs. Reality

   How many times has this happened to you? I know that in at least in 3/4 cases I lived this thing during my exams. So sad..

 

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A common problem with computers

   I think this photo shows a clear common problem related to the compatibility of today's browsers with Windows.

   I don't know what's the morale of this photo. Maybe you have one, so please leave a comment if you have any ideas!

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How to achieve infinite power!

   What scientist doesn't want to discover the holy grail of energy? The opportunity to have infinite power at your disposal? This is the solution!

Infinite power

   I hope you all enjoyed this one as much as I did, and you all know the physics behind it. But if you do, please tell me in the comments because I'm not sure. Is the resistance infinite in this situation? (I hope I got it right)

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Computer engineer or serial killer? Do you know how to make the difference?

   As I was surfing on the Internet I came across an interesting flash "game". I had to pick if a person shown in a picture was a serial killer or a computer engineer. Sadly, I couldn't know the difference and I gave the engineer "diploma" to more criminals than true engineers. (Hint: there is one person who is both an engineer and a killer, that one I got right)

   I recognised only 3/10 people, so I should watch out for computer science engineers. I might not know what their hobby really is.

   You can take the test HERE!

   Please post your score in the comment section! Let's see if you can make the difference.

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Time out = funny engineering

   Judging by the last time I posted on this blog, I really did need a time out. I'm in the middle of my exam session right now and I barely had time to do anything else. But trying to relax myself, on the Internet of course, I found a few amusing things that I want to share with the world. Here they are! (and of course, they're about what we do, ENGINEERING!)

   And of course you all know the debate around the half empty / half full glass. Well, this is the only correct answer the way that an engineer will explain it.

    I hope you enjoyed them, and if you did please leave a comment and be back soon!

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Let's begin!

   First of all I would like to present myself to the audience. My name is Radu Gheorghiu and I'm from Romania. I'm a 22 year old student working and studying to be an engineer, hopefully next year after I receive my Bachelor's degree in Computer Science.


   My life unfolds as a complex day to day algorithm: I eat, I sleep, I engineer! After one year of studying at a Politechnical university, here in Cluj Napoca, during which my daily schedule differed enormously from the adjacent days I slowly found a common base to my everyday activities as an aspiring engineer composed of the three activities mentioned earlier.


  I eat: like every person I do this on a daily basis, at least three times a day. My eating schedule has undergone a lot of change since my first year of faculty. At first I ate when I had the time and as much as I could, but now I try to keep a strict and less flexible eating schedule.


  I sleep: the sleeping part is relative to the last point of my daily activities. From my first year as a student, the sleeping schedule was as chaotic as my eating and usually followed it. Now, in my third year I found the miracle of coffee and organized work, so my sleeping schedule also fell into a more normal pattern.


  I engineer! : this is what I came here (faculty) for! This is my daily activity that occupies most of my time. I'm either going to the courses and labs everyday, either working at home for some school projects, I'm almost at any time doing it. Even if I finish my projects I'm still looking on Google for something techincal, something related to engineering. As I have mentioned, I'm a Computer Science student and so I'm 80% of the time in front of my laptop. I enjoy doing a lot of portable "mini-viruses", editing images (I also like photography), studying about computer networks (I'm studying for my last exam for my CISCO CCNA degree) and I'm attracted to almost anything that requires engineering, be it brainstorming, programming, or artistic (arts go perfectly with engineering!)


  I intend to use this blog as a mean of sharing my ideas as an engineer (even if I don't have a diploma yet), as a mean of discussing issues that I come across in my life as an engineer and other fun facts that engineers enjoy. So, yes this blog will be about engineering, but viewed from a funnier, less serious way.


  And as any Computer Science student, there are a lot of Java projects to be done at all time, so I'll go and work on mine now. But I will be back after they're done! (and maybe even post something about them)


 System.exit(0);