Friday (May 11th) was the University of Waterloo Student Design Symposium, which showcased personal projects from our bright and promising first, second and third year engineering students. All of these projects were worked on in the student’s free time to feed their curiosity.
Each project had demonstrated a novel idea that would pique the interest of nearly anyone walking by, such as a demonstration of a form of Chess AI, and a new spin on Conway’s Game of Life which added a fun and intriguing multiplayer aspect to the simulator. There were a few projects for the audiophiles as well: a Cmoy-based headphone amplifier, and a very vintage tube-based audio amplifier. Speaking of vintage, there was also a project that utilized steampunk-esque Nixie Tubes as a retro 1960’s numeric display. Another display project took the idea of multiplexing a row of LED’s that are rotated around a motor to create flashy mechanical signage.
One of the more software based projects tackled the issue of syncing web tabs over multiple computers in real time, instead of sharing URLs. The web add-on, cleverly titled “CrO4” (Chromate, as in a friend for your Chrome browser.. Haha!) allows the user to seamlessly share their tabs between browsers on separate computers in real time. An example of its functionality goes as such: say you are browsing your favourite news aggregate that starts with an R and rhymes with Reddit, and you click on a bunch of links. You then walk to class, and pull out your laptop (which is not the computer you were on before) to continue your internet surfing before a lecture begins. Usually you would have to sift through all of the links again, as you would not know which you have already read (via the telltale purpling of the link). With CrO4, the Javascript update on all of your browser tabs between computers are updated in real time, therefore all of your purples will still be purple! Happy news-site readers everywhere!
This symposium truly shows Waterloo Engineering ‘s great group of innovative and novel thinkers, and I hope the trend is continued so that we can see more of what our fellow classmates can do!
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