This evening we had two short presentations, each competing for the cash prize.
Joshua opened by enthusiastically promoting the Stirling engine. Invented nearly two hundred years ago, this external combustion engine has never quite managed to live up to expectations but continues to draw enthusiasts from each new generation of engineering students! Joshua highlighted the engine’s potential to use low-grade heat, mixed fuels or even solar power. Compared to ‘explosive’ internal combustion engines this engine is intrinsically a lot quieter in operation, which, of course, is highly desirable for domestic applications such as micro-combined heat and power systems.
I remember my own interest being raised during ‘first year thermodynamics’ and on mentioning this to my engineer father he said he had felt the same. Is this now the Stirling’s moment?
Abdul then outlined the task set by a syndicate of students to produce a low-cost, page-turning, document scanner. This group saw a niche market of students wishing to digitise textbooks for personal study. The project was in its early stages but they hoped to reach a conclusion within this academic year.
It will be interesting to see if it is possible to cope with the very variable properties of textbooks, such as, size, thickness, stiffness and page format. Will the team be satisfied with a simple photograph of each page or will they manage to acquire an image that can be converted to a text file?
Scanning is one of the few areas of ‘computing’ where I have paid more for each successive scanner! Scanning bound material has always been difficult, let alone page turning. I’ve never understood why designers of flatbed scanners haven’t realised the benefit of an asymmetric layout, i.e. reducing the frame size to an absolute minimum on one edge, allowing it to be tucked into the ‘gutter’ of a book. Would it be possible to produce a thin sheet containing both light producing and light sensing elements? Such a device could be slipped between the pages of almost any book. Of course one might hope that the students’ original ‘problem’ would be solved by all publishers of textbooks providing their material in digital form as a matter of course.
Our two competitors clearly had a lot of peer support and put their cases well, Abdul being the winner of the evening. Given the size of the mainly youthful audience it is a pity that other items in the IET programme don’t attract the same level of younger supporters. Do the topics not interest them or do they feel they or not for them? Maybe they just have better things to do!
