So! The usual well-wishing and greetings to ya! I hope everyone’s spring break was relaxing. Mine was. Well, most of the time. My car had a pretty serious malfunction, and I got a little sad to leave, but now I’m back at Lehigh and already back in the rhythm of things.
One aside before I launch into the rest of this post: if you haven’t taken my survey, please do! It’s for a speech about gender that I’m putting together to be presented in April. The survey is open to literally anyone, even non-Lehigh-affiliated people, and you can have a chance to win an Amazon or Paypal gift card! If the link above doesn’t work, just type in bit.do/gendersurvey2014 into your browser window. You can also complete it on mobile browsers if you prefer to do things on-the-go.
Now then, on to other things. I’ve seen a fair few posts about the Arduino controllers the Engineering 10 class is using, and as much as I hate to follow suit… the things are so darn cool. You can do all sorts of crazy stuff with them. Although all we’ve been doing in class is lighting up LEDs, you can do SO many other things with them–the only limit is your imagination (and, well, coding proficiency, I guess).
A couple things people have made with Arduinos: drawing programs operated by nothing but your eyeballs (awesome idea for enabling people with movement disabilities/severe paralysis with better communication!), tree-climbing robots, a biking jacket with LED turn signals, a flame-throwing jack-o-lantern, a chess-playing robot (Noah, I swear I will make you one of these one day), a wireless chess set you can play over a distance, a Twitter-powered coffee machine, and even a retractable iPhone-controlled hydraulic kitchen island. Click each thing for more info on the project, and even tutorials.
Now, admittedly, most of these projects require auxiliary equipment, like LEDs, cameras, magnets, servos, and in the case of the kitchen island, a giant hydraulic scissor lift, but the Arduinos are the things that make all those things actually work. I plan on messing around with the Arduino outside of class, too. See? Classes can show you some pretty awesome stuff sometimes.
For more info on the EyeWriter (eyeball drawing program), see here.
First-Year Lehigh Engineers 