Quick Face Recognition With An FPGA

It’s the 21st century, and according to a lot of sci-fi movies we should have perfected AI by now, right? Well we are getting there, and this project from a group of Cornell University students titled, “FPGA kNN Recognition” is a graceful attempt at facial recognition.

For the uninitiated, the K-nearest neighbors or kNN Algorithm is a very simple classification algorithm that uses similarities between given sets of data and a data point being examined to predict where the said data point belongs. In this project, the authors use a camera to take an image and then save its histogram …read more

Continue reading Quick Face Recognition With An FPGA

Small Jet Engine Model From Students Who Think Big

We love to highlight great engineering student projects at Hackaday. We also love environment-sensing microcontrollers, 3D printing, and jet engines. The X-Plorer 1 by JetX Engineering checks all the boxes.

This engineering student exercise took its members through the development process of a jet engine. Starting from a set of requirements to meet, they designed their engine and analyzed it in software before embarking on physical model assembly. An engine monitoring system was developed in parallel and integrated into the model. These embedded sensors gave performance feedback, and armed with data the team iterated though ideas to improve their design. …read more

Continue reading Small Jet Engine Model From Students Who Think Big

Students Build Electromagnetic Egg Drop Stand

The Egg Drop is a classic way to get students into engineering, fabrication, and experimentation. It’s a challenge to build a container to protect a raw egg from cracking when dropped from various heights.

Here’s a way to add some extra hardware to use when testing each entry. It’s an  electromagnetic drop stand built by several students along with [Tom Jenkins]. The stand doesn’t require anything too exotic, and it allows students to drop their eggs in a controlled manner for a fair competition. Along the way, they learn about circuits, electromagnets, and some other electronic concepts.

If this sounds …read more

Continue reading Students Build Electromagnetic Egg Drop Stand