Engineers, what was your Senior Project?

Anyone else hear about the autonomous lawnmower group from a few years ago that basically faked most of their project?

Go on.

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Go on.

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This group was a couple years before my time so I don't know all of the specifics. The gist is that their project was basically a self driving lawnmower. You'd set it off and it would mow your yard all on it's own.

Well apparently this group procrastinated very hard. They got the actual lawnmower built, but did basically no work on the self driving part. So when it came time for final presentations, they presented everything as if the autonomous part was completed. They even showed a video of the lawnmower cutting grass "on it's own", but in reality there was just a guy outside of the shot controlling it with a remote control, like a big RC truck.

Everyone was fooled and they passed the class and graduated. It wasn't until after they graduated that word reached the department that they faked the biggest part of their project. They couldn't really do anything since they already graduated, but now it's required that an in person demonstration has to be done at some point.

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showed a video of the lawnmower cutting grass "on it's own", but in reality there was just a guy outside of the shot controlling it with a remote control, like a big RC truck

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but now it's required that an in person demonstration has to be done at some point

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I could fool all of those PHDs by hiring a dude to be nearby, operating the remote control, during said in-person demonstration.

In fact, I would have a raging hard-on while giving such a presentation.

Designing a site plan for a Mellow Mushroom restaurant

Group was a shite show

College Senior Project?

RFID Tracking System.

Formula SAE (Mini-Indy) 1997. We revived the team after a hiatus of a couple of years. We were a ragtag group, but we somehow pulled it off and went to Detroit to compete. For a team that had no idea what they were getting into, we did OK until one of our team members crashed the car pretty good. Still a great experience.

I was in an early EEC (Electrical Computer option) class at LSU.

Designed a memory chip for my VLSI class, but when the designs were shipped off for build, the mask that was used had the power and ground shorted together, so every chip that was returned was a smoke maker. And they only did that once.

I didn’t do undergrad in engineering, but in grad school I machined Teflon, with a grey scale mask, using x-rays.