The New Semester

The project assignment: do something and have it relate to sustainability in some fashion.

As this logbook is no longer assigned, I will probably devote it a lot of it to explaining cool things that I want to learn about. Also, it will cover the progress of our semester-long engineering project.

I've moved around groups a bit since the beginning of the semester but I will describe the main project ideas that came up:

1. Make the machines in the gym provide power to the building. While this seems like a good idea at first, the gym managers have no interest as the project wouldn't pay-off financially for a very long time.
   
2. Make a self-powered pedometer. The idea here is that a pedometer works by measuring the shaking motion of your body. If it's already shaking, then why not capture this energy in order to use it to power the device? While the idea is good and energy can be (and is being in some cases) captured from the movement of the human body, the pedometer itself would still not be very sustainable because of the materials that would be required to make it. Anther drawback of such a project is that if the pedometer were made to capture energy from a footfall, then we'd have to be careful to not mess up with the walking motion.
3.  Make a laser harp. If you've never seen a laser harp then you should see this video (the first minute or so is introduction but it's a pretty good video). Basically, they're cool and we wanted to make one. Simple as that. In order to incorporate sustainability we added the phrase "self-powered" to mean we'd put some kind of mechanism to power it mechanically from the movement of the user. Of course, we didn't get very far with this idea because there was no real "problem" that needed solving. 
4. Renovate the model of the engineering school. This is the project that we've currently settled on. 

There is a model of the engineering school that shows the buildings (in an orange-beige), a lot more trees than we actually have (in beige), and the roads (also in beige). The buildings are not labeled and there is no way to figure out where you are. Really, there's not much use for the model at all. Having talked to a tour guide (who absolutely hates the map), we're considering what features to add. As of right now these are the features we are considering:

1. A directory so that people can either press a button or select a building from a list. The corresponding building will light up. 
2. Path-ways that light up so that the tour guides can show the path they will take before they begin the tour. 
3. Directions to get to other places on grounds.

 Well, we've a long way to go but at least we have an idea. More to come!