Our Presentation and The Lemelson-Rensselaer Student Prize

Last Thursday our InvenTeam packed up early and left school for Troy, NY to check out the Lemelson-Rensselaer Student Prize Ceremony. We got to watch Dorothy Lemelson, chair of the Lemelson Foundation, and Alan Cramb, dean of the School of Engineering, award Martin Schubert the $30,000 Lemelson-Rensselaer Student Prize for his work in creating the first ever polarized LED. Not only did we get to hear about all of the really cool inventions all four...

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Lemelson-RPI Student Prize

On February 28th our InvenTeam has been asked to join in the exciting festivities of the awarding of the Lemelson-Rensselaer Student Prize 2008. This prestigious award is granted to "a Rensselaer senior or graduate student who has created or improved a product or process, applied a technology in a new way, or otherwise demonstrated remarkable inventiveness."Not only are we being given the oppertunity to be part of this awesome award ceremony but afterwards we are meeting with Brian Schulkin, the 2007 winner of the Lemelson-RPI Student Prize.Schulkin...

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Sonar Range Finder

Today, Steve and I put together a sonar range finder. The device is just a small black cylinder, about a half inch in diameter and a half inch tall with three wires sticking off of it.First, I had to solder the wires onto the device. I'm not very experienced with a soldering iron and I didn't want to set the fire alarm off, so this put a little pressure on me, but I pulled it off!Then, I wired it to our SensorDAQ and made a quick program in LabVIEW. The sonar sensor has an output that displays the measured distance as a multiple of 127 µS (micro-seconds)....

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Putting Together the Software Pieces

The last couple of weeks have been exciting for our team! The database group successfully uploaded a database of 49 plants to the web server using MySQL. The database uses 18 specific fields for each plant, so that we can match plants as closely as possible with soil conditions. Additionally, students working working on Perl and HTML programming successfully created a web page that searches the database for plant-specific information, and will soon be able to add information to the database. They also created a basic interface for the web page...

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Attention: Videos No Longer On-Line

Hello All -I appologise for the inconveniance but the informational and educational videos we have made have been temporarily taken off-line.We are now learning the ins and outs of copyright laws and by the request of Melissa Makofske, communications director for the Lemelson-MIT Program, we are taking our videos off-line until we recieve permission from the owners of all images we used in our presentations.We have begun contacting the owners of images we have used and all have been more than ok with our use of them. This is just antoher learning...

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Contributors to the "Site Assessment for Gardeners" Workbook Lend a Helping Hand

About a week ago I sent out e-mails to various contributors to the "Site Assessment for Gardeners" Workbook, asking if they wouldn't mind providing suggestions to improve our digital modifications to the manual site tests described in the workbook. I am pleased to say that I am currently in contact with four of the contributors, and they have all provided invaluable advice on many aspects of our project. Cornell University Professors Dr. Nina Bassuk and Dr. Tammo Steenhuis, Craig Cramer, and retired Cornell University Professor and author of the...

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