Project

# Title Team Members TA Documents Sponsor
44 A Better Lava Lamp 2.0
 Erik Eldridge
Ignacio Bernhard Iber Diaz
Jacob Lawrence
 Daniel Frei design_document0.pdf
design_document0.pdf
design_document0.pdf
final_paper0.pdf
presentation0.pdf
proposal0.pdf
Team:
Erik Eldridge - eeldrid2
Jake Lawrence - jdlawre2
Ignacio Iber Diaz - ibi3

Description:
We aim build a “better” lava lamp to satisfy the requirements of the project pitched by TA James Norton, who will be acting as our “client”. Our lava lamp will be the second iteration of a design created by students in a previous semester, and must be made to be safer, brighter, and more efficient than the first. We will improve upon the previous PCB design and include wireless interactivity, which will allow the user to control the LEDs that brighten the lamp. The new main hardware element in our project will be an inductive heating circuit which is driven by a simple control system. The inductive heating system will eliminate the heating plate on the bottom of the lamp. Instead of heating the liquid inside of the lamp indirectly by heating the bottom of the glass, we will warm the liquid directly by placing our heating element inside of the lamp in order to increase safety and efficiency. Our design also will include the multi-colored LED’s from the previous version but will be brighter due to the removal of the heating plate obstruction above it.

Similar products:
No similar product is commercially available.

Wireless IntraNetwork

Daniel Gardner, Jeeth Suresh

Wireless IntraNetwork

Featured Project

There is a drastic lack of networking infrastructure in unstable or remote areas, where businesses don’t think they can reliably recoup the large initial cost of construction. Our goal is to bring the internet to these areas. We will use a network of extremely affordable (<$20, made possible by IoT technology) solar-powered nodes that communicate via Wi-Fi with one another and personal devices, donated through organizations such as OLPC, creating an intranet. Each node covers an area approximately 600-800ft in every direction with 4MB/s access and 16GB of cached data, saving valuable bandwidth. Internal communication applications will be provided, minimizing expensive and slow global internet connections. Several solutions exist, but all have failed due to costs of over $200/node or the lack of networking capability.

To connect to the internet at large, a more powerful “server” may be added. This server hooks into the network like other nodes, but contains a cellular connection to connect to the global internet. Any device on the network will be able to access the web via the server’s connection, effectively spreading the cost of a single cellular data plan (which is too expensive for individuals in rural areas). The server also contains a continually-updated several-terabyte cache of educational data and programs, such as Wikipedia and Project Gutenberg. This data gives students and educators high-speed access to resources. Working in harmony, these two components foster economic growth and education, while significantly reducing the costs of adding future infrastructure.