• Question: What is the best thing you ever made?

    Asked by Bambino Beast to Ashley, Catherine, John G, Laura, Ray on 10 Nov 2014. This question was also asked by ALC, niamh heffernan.
    • Photo: Catherine Conaghan

      Catherine Conaghan answered on 10 Nov 2014:

      I don’t know if its the best thing I’ve ever made, but my favourite thing was a robot in 3rd year of college. We called him Teddy the Robot.

    • Photo: John Ging

      John Ging answered on 10 Nov 2014:

      A photodetector. Basically it could capture light coming from multiple sources at once and tell me the power, direction and wavelength of each.
      Sounds dull, but the thing was only 1 cm wide and .006 of a cm high.

    • Photo: Ray Alcorn

      Ray Alcorn answered on 10 Nov 2014:

      Well.. I was part of the team that built a full scale wave energy device in Australia.. but the best part of it for me was the turbo-machine and electrical control system. Without the hardware and software I designed, the whole plant would not have worked at all. the knowledge i gained from that has gone into many other designs to help the whole sector move forward.

    • Photo: Laura Tobin

      Laura Tobin answered on 10 Nov 2014:

      It’s not going to sound exciting but a solar cell testing station (see my work photos). I hooked up several pieces of equipment like a sourcemeter (reads current & voltage), a temperature controller and a rotational stage (to change the angle) and I controlled them all on a piece of software that I wrote and custom designed. The software allows you to create a virtual panel on the PC, so it looks like another piece of equipment. It meant that we could test all types of solar cells really quickly and easily. It doesn’t sound awesome but to me it was amazing. I’m very proud of it especially when other people asked could they use it.

    • Photo: Ashley Culbert

      Ashley Culbert answered on 16 Nov 2014:

      In college I built a pick and place unit. This was designed to work on a production line to pick items from one conveyor, place it into a machine, and then take it back and put it on a different conveyor. The movements for this were powered by pneumatics and I used a programmable logic controller to control the sequence

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