.: Abrasion Hologram Printer

An Abrasion Hologram is a 3D image embedded into a flat sheet of metal or plastic without the use of expensive lasers. Instead, a needle is used to scratch arcs into the surface, which reflect light in such a way as to create the illusion of a 3D image.

The video to the left describes the phenomenon in detail and introduces Mike's Senior Design project: a "printer" that produces holograms based on computer-generated models.

The status of this team project can be found at the project website, and instructions on how to create hand-drawn abrasion holograms can be found at Bill Beaty's website.

.: Koules: a game for Android OS

Koules is a physics-based arcade game originally developed by Jan Hubicka in 1995 for Linux and OS/2 systems.

Mike is developing a clone to run on Google's Android operating system for mobile phones. The devices' tilt sensors will be used to control the player, and OpenGL ES will provide hardware-accelerated graphics.

A demo version is available for Windows which uses the Tao framework (an OpenGL binding for .NET). Extract the folder from the zip file and run Koules.exe (or KoulesGDI.exe if that doesn't work).

Drag the mouse on the screen to move the player around. The goal is to knock all the red Koules off the screen before being knocked off the screen yourself.

.: SuperDoku

SuperDoku is a project designed around the idea of bringing sudoku (an immensely popular Japanese puzzle game often published in newspapers) to handheld Windows Mobile (Pocket PC) devices with an aesthetic and intuitive user interface.

Many features were inspired by the way people intuitively work with paper sudoku grids, but other features were inspired by those who've said "I WISH my paper sudoku puzzles could...", such as giving intelligent hints and having a skinnable interface (colors, symbols, even ancient hieroglyphics can be used instead of just numbers!).

SuperDoku has gotten very positive reviews and development continues on a new version that will add the most requested features, such as high-resolution support and a game timer.

Version 1.1 can be downloaded here and the new version is scheduled for an open-source release soon.

.: K'NEX Grandfather Clock

This working pendulum-and-weight-powered grandfather clock stands 5 and a half feet tall and was made entirely of K'NEX pieces, pennies for weights, and strings for winding.

It was developed in 2005 purely for the fun and challenge involved.

It keeps accurate time for about an hour on one winding.

Click on the picture to the left to enlarge it, or view a video showing the operation of the internal anchor and escapement mechanism.

Also, a technical report describes the entire device in detail.

.: Interactive Map

Another experiment in Human Factors Engineering, this interactive map was developed in C# for Direct Supply in 2007 to allow users to easily associate states with manufacturer ship-points by selecting the desired states then clicking the required point.

This time-saving solution replaces the awkward text-list based interface that the company used previously.

.: MIPS Microcontroller

Taking cues from the work done by John L. Hennessy at Stanford University in the early 1980's, this multi-cycle MIPS Microcontroller was designed in the circuit simulation software Quartus II in 2008 as a combination of VHDL and circuit schematic diagrams. It demonstrated functionally complete MIPS architecture, with most of the core instructions implemented.

Click on the picture for the full high-level schematic, or click here to download the source code.

.: Eiffel Tower

At 4 feet tall, this just-for-fun project was a 1:265 scale model of the Eiffel Tower made of 470 coins (mostly quarters).

The colored clips are from a construction kit called CoinStruction.

The pieces can be seen more easily in the enlarged picture.

Built from scratch in 2007, the project took about 15 hours of design, strength-testing and building time.