CSE 477 Pictures

These first two pictures show the Hardware Design Lab at one of its busier hours. In the first picture we see Dave and Christen in the lower right working on their robot truck. The vacant lab bench on the left is mine, where I'm working on my toaster. Closer to the window is ??? and ??? working on their IR serial link. And behind Dave and Christen is Minh and Chris, debugging their IR-controlled robot.

This next wide angle lab picture shows the second bank of benches, and the little corner near Stephen Lee's office (Stephen is the lab's manager). Stephen (left) is shown talking to ???.

Here we see Chris working on our toaster. The base toaster we chose is from the 1950's vintage. One of the "features" of this toaster is that it does not cool off very quickly, and cannot toast slices of bread very well without cooling off between times. That is why we have the fan at the bench. Unfortunately, the fan had the annoying tendency to blow all the bread crumbs all over our work area!

While I was standing on the work bench, I decided to talk advantage of my vantage point. We see here Dave and Christen working on their robot truck (Christen is hiding most of it with her arm). Behind them are Minh and Chris working on their writeup for their IR-controlled robot. The writeup was, for the most part, the last thing on our minds as we worked fanticly in these last hours.

Jason Urban was one of two people who was working on PursueBot. The basic idea for the robot was to identify a moving object (usually Jason) and pursue it. PursueBot's "eyes" were two sonic range finders, whose data was interpretted and reacted to by the microcontroller.

Kathy and Ryan spent much of their time hiding in this corner of the hardware lab. Also shown in this picture is their project, the Electronic Phonebook and Dialer.

Working for 36 continuous hours without rest takes great stamina. Much of this energy was supplied in little 12 oz. cans of Coke and Mt. Dew (Mt. Dew mostly). The remainder was given by six pounds of mixed cookies (shown above the terminal on the left side of the picture). These life-sustaining goodies were supplied out of the goodness of the hearts of my parents, Craig and Cathy.

Here's my little toaster, about 18 hours before it was ready for its demo. Chris and I had yet to push all the electronics into the experimenter's box (bolted beneath the toaster) or calibrate the temperature sensor.