Our Design Project

In the spring term of 2001, I took a course known as AER201S, commonly known as Engineering Design. This is not a conventional course... the entire term is spent designing, constructing, and presenting a design project that you and your team of two other people work on, supervised directly by your TA. In our case, we designed a machine that sorted Skittles by its five colours, red, yellow, orange, green, and purple. The RFP (Request For Proposal) can be downloaded here.

There are eight pictures on this page. Only the top four are for our own project.


Here is the one and only picture of our team and our project together. We took another picture similar to this one, but it was blurred when the camera moved. That's me, Kris, and Sam going from left to right. I was doing electromechanical, Kris interfacing, and Sam computers.


A panaromic view of our project.


A bird's eye view. Note the power supply on the right that gave me an electric shock that threw me about a meter away... I'm lucky it was AC not DC. We threw it away after that.


A side view. Those solder boards resting in the center control the entire project through a PIC16F877 microprocessor. All the electronic components were placed on the outside, to facilitate cooling and easy maintenance.

Some design memories I posted on the unofficial Design newsgroup. It used to be our ECE253 newsgroup, but we figured we would be the only ones using it anyways, so we sorta usurped it. It's amazing how surreal things feel at 4:00 in the morning...

  • Dave's del operator

  • Your mom is like a zener diode.. she takes it both ways!

  • John's restaurant (both of them)

  • "Aaaah!"

  • Frank-sci, Dave-sci, Hank-sci, Sam-sci, Kris-sci...

  • Yuval's assortment of hot teas

  • Drilling a hole in your lab notebook?

  • Various people passed out in the common room

  • Where's my bastard? (mill bastard file)

  • Enya/Bob Marley/Classical Thunder/Boom boom boom/Kiss92/Bela Fleck

  • Sam on group sex: It doesn't have to be in series, it can be parallel

  • Terri (f!rosh) getting mad at us for talking about sex

  • Gordy stories... enough said

  • Pizza-Pizza at 3 AM

  • Sharon's passover cookies, Carrie's chocolate chip cookies

  • Let's hold the project out the window so I can dremel outside...

  • F*cktard...

  • Professor Cheng walking in as Dave writes F*cktard on the board


    • A picture of the Engineering Science common room, around 4:45 AM in the morning. Note the various pieces of garbage on the floor and the people passed out on the couches. In fact, the person asleep on the couch on the right is me... I went to sleep around 4 AM that night.


    Here's another picture taken a bit later, in the study room next to the office just outside the common room. Say hi to Moe, everybody!


    This is Emily, Frank, and Dave, with their project in the background. Also in the study room.


    A closeup of their project.

    All the pictures on this page, except for the first one, were taken by Andrew, our TA for this course. Thanks a lot for these pictures, Andrew!

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