EE2001

There is this major project where all NUS EE and CPE people must go through. It is like the JCC course of the infantry, the hell week of the navy, and whatever nightmarish course you have for the air force.

This is EE2001, and when I did it, it was one hell of a semester (and it was my best semester too). EE2001 sort of like wraps up the entire year 2 syllabus -- in other words, when you reach this project, consider yourself to have reached a milestone. Give yourself a pat, and then prepare for year 3 and beyond. For those people who had done this before but hadn't noticed, EE2001 is the first of the many projects where tutors literally 丢你去死. Very little help was given. Tutors ignore emails, there's no lecturers to consult, objectives are vague, schedules and deadlines doesn't make sense -- much like the world we live in right now.

That was like 2 semesters ago when I did the project. Anyway, something to share with the younger NUSians (or whatever you called NUS people):

Ta-dah! The end product. The exterior walls can be removed to reveal the inside. We planned to do a transformer-like style of auto-transforming this part -- that would be spectacular. Then someone with the heart went to spoil it , saying it can't be done.

Note the plastic wall. Pretty eh?


Rocks! Can you even imagine?? Anyway the whole thing became so heavy, that the base wraps and dents


The lateral view


Interiors


The plastic walls again!


Bird-eye view of interior


Sick attention to details: we've got doors for the model


The aftermath


Everyone pretending to be busy for this shot

By the way, EE2001 is about envisioning the future of smart homes and then translating these visions into real working models. Our home consists of many modes of operations, each mode activates accordingly to the mood of the current user. Of course, to detect the moods, we use the MOTT chip (MOTT == mood-O-thematic-translator?) that was taught to us in an earlier module. However, the MOTT chip uses a lot of power. It jumps to 12A whenever the module is attached to the other circuit boards. We had to buy a $100 power supply just to install this MOTT chip into our home.

Another interesting feature of our home is the "earthquake eliminator" feature that we built with the zero-gravity drive. The ZGD is actually pretty useless for anything heavier than 5kg. In fact, we went through a lot of trouble to fit everything under 5kg. Once we complete that part, you can actually see the house floating on air, pretty cool actually.

The ZGD leads to another problem: we had installed the ZGD too early during the development phase. Whenever we fix new things onto the house, the ZGD couldn't decipher the new weight-points and cause the house to wobble whenever we switched it on. In the end, we have to spare manpower to tweak and configure it whenever new stuff are added. Consequently, our house is actually slightly overweight, at about 5.5kg, and hence wraps when the ZGD is switched on.

Finally, one last eye catching feature is the "room with full LCD screen". Imagine walking into a room that is fully clothed with LCD screens on all walls. The idea is to transport users to environment that suit most to the user's current mood. E.g., beside the seaside when the weather is hot, right beside the lava pit when the weather is treacherous -- you get the idea. We fitted one full room with Sony PSP LCDs. Surprisingly, PSP LCD is the cheapest source of small screened full-colored LCD. Normally one would cost near $1k. The hardest part of this is to join the few LCD screen to the controller chip. Thereafter, the programming is straight forward, although interfacing with the MOTT chip is quick tricky again.

In the end, we managed to bag an A from the hard work we put into this project. Simply saying "hard work" is really an understatement. I remembered sleeping just 3 to 4 hours a day for a week to rush for a deadline. Before EE2001, we were just another student lurking around, you know, just lurking around thinking its great to be in college. After EE2001, we grew up, became more responsible, experienced the threats of deadlines, tasted the bitterness of trials and failures, and moved one step closer in becoming an accomplished engineer.