EVOO, a cooking school in Cannon Beach, Ore., wants to produce gourmet sea salt from the Pacific Ocean, so they enlisted the help of three senior chemical engineering students — Austin Danielson, Cameron Oden, and Paul Robideau — to develop a sustainable technology to achieve their goal. Besides producing salt products that can be variously flavored, the team wants to create a potable water byproduct that can be used to irrigate a community garden and provide a water source for animals. Continue reading
Author Archives: philliab
Real-time stereovision
When humans view the world with two healthy eyes, we see in stereovision, which gives us depth perception and allows us to avoid running into the things around us. Scientists have long since implemented stereovision in computer systems for various applications, but until recently it wasn’t practical to implement such a system in real time because of the large amount of computational power it required. Continue reading
Solar thermal ice for vaccine storage
What if a low-cost solar thermal ice production system could be used to refrigerate vaccines without electricity? Adam Gage, Peter Shoaf, Jeromie Webster, and Logan Olsen think it would be pretty cool. The team developed a method to harness naturally occurring adsorption/desorption cycles to help developing countries increase vaccine availability. Continue reading
Retro arcade game player
Sometimes it’s in going backward that we move forward. At least that’s what Kyle Thompson, Flint Yoder, and José Terrazas may have thought when they designed a multi-user, open-source system that can host vintage arcade games such as Tetris and Snake. The system includes a controller; a super-bright RGB display designed to fit behind frosted glass to create an aesthetically pleasing piece of functional art; and handpicked joysticks meant to mimic the experience of gaming in a retro arcade. Continue reading
Inexpensive wireless robotic hand
It can be traumatic enough when someone needs a prosthetic device, but it can be doubly so when that person is faced with the price tag. And then the expensive prosthetic may not even give the person enough functionality to make it worth it. “The current price of prosthetics goes in the thousands, and they are all semi-functional,” said Aleksandar Bogdanovic, a graduating senior in the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Continue reading