• Question: What is the most interesting thing you have designed/helped design?

    Asked by Han Solo to Alex, Chris, Mohamed, Rik, Victoria on 6 Mar 2015.
    • Photo: Rik Allen

      Rik Allen answered on 6 Mar 2015:

      Hi.
      This is a little difficult – because sometimes you might be working on something fairly boring, but find a small problem that can become fascinating on its own. I once had a lot of fun on about 12 lines of a program to do the last stage in a 3-d graphics engine – making it go as fast as possible.

      For the projects as a whole, I think the video encoder for the Iphone was most interesting – working with great engineers on something many people will use, where you can continue to make the product better and better over time.

    • Photo: Victoria Sharpe

      Victoria Sharpe answered on 8 Mar 2015:

      The most interesting thing I have designed and developed is a tubular circular sewing machine. Amazing no one had ever thought of that before. It was computer controlled so you could place a stitch exactly where you wanted it. It was developed so that a supporting wire spiral could be sewn onto a fabric tube, resulting in a stent graft (medical implant) that it is flexible in all directions.

    • Photo: Alex Shenfield

      Alex Shenfield answered on 9 Mar 2015:

      The most interesting things I’ve worked on have generally been personal projects – probably because I’ve been in control of the whole process from design to assembly to programming.

      I built a self balancing robot that uses a couple of acceleration sensors and gyroscopes to calculate and correct for the tilt of the body (in a similar way to a segway scooter). It serves little to no purpose – apart from getting to play with some ideas I’d read about!

      I’ve also worked with a couple of colleagues on a couple of versions of brain controlled scalextric race systems! To make the cars go faster you have to concentrate really hard – which can be harder than you’d think 🙂

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