The Technograph

Every year, for one Friday and Saturday in mid-March, Green Street and the surrounding areas take on the feel of a carnival. Flocks of visiting students roam from building to building and the smell of pizza, mixed with the sound of live music, floats out from the entertainment tent just east of Everitt Lab.

This is Engineering Open House, a two-day event designed to showcase the work of students in the College of Engineering. Exhibits ranged from the everyday—a demonstration and explanation of why tube amps produce a better guitar sound than transistors do—to the extraordinary, like a work-in-progress remote control SUV. Here are four notable exhibits from this year’s EOH:

Rube Goldberg Machine

The Rube Goldberg exhibit drew consistent crowds. Team members designed a contraption that replaces an incandescent light bulb with a more energy-efficient alternative. The Illinois team chose to unify their machine with a “Clue” theme. The chain of events starts with a dice roll and ends with a toy train switching on a compact fluorescent bulb seventy steps later. Intermediate steps incorporate murder weapons from the game, unfortunate demises for game characters, and, most importantly, a mechanical hand physically changing an incandescent bulb to a compact fluorescent. The Rube Goldberg team took first place in the regional competition and second at the national competition on March 28.

Biodiesel

The most practical exhibit belonged to the UIUC Biodiesel Initiative. On display was their small reactor with a 50-60 gallon capacity. This reactor uses methanol and a base such as potassium hydroxide to convert waste vegetable oil from the dorm dining halls into usable biodiesel fuel. The group’s large reactor was a 400 gallon capacity, and the product biodiesel is used to make a diesel blend that is 5 percent biodiesel for use in University fleet vehicles.

Spatially Augmented Reality

In the Siebel Center was an exhibit demonstrating the projection of textures onto three-dimensional objects. A plain box became a small waterfall, and a blank mannequin was given a realistic face. Also remarkable was that the device can determine the orientation of the object to be textured by projecting patterns of black-and-white bars onto the object and comparing it to a saved 3D model.

Pinball Machine

The Pinball Machine was one of many kid-friendly exhibits at EOH. The contraption had the feel and features of a real pinball machine: bumpers, targets, flippers, and a scoreboard. However, this was a pinball machine designed for multiplayer use. Instead of having only two buttons for the left- and right-side flippers, the machine was designed with sets of flippers for several participants. This pinball machine also had a “college life” theme, and players needed to hit “academic” targets as well as “social” ones or they lost points. Team members described this as a representation of the balance of college life between burning out and failing out.

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