I wish to enter a program at a local university called the "High Achievers Admission Scheme". I meet the school academic requirements (only a few HA's are required) but another request in the admission form is that you put down all the extra-curricular activites that you have done that are related to the course. I've done squat. That wouldn't be good for my application.

It suggests several things you can do: one of them (with the most weight, I would say) is a competition at the university for school students called the "Excellence Expo". There are several categories, one of which is judged by the school of Microelectronic Engineering (which the course I want to do is part of). This would look good on the application, especially if I did well.

You submit a project, and get judged on originality, engineering, and how well it works, among other things. I have no idea what I could do. Post you suggestions here.

(to start off I thought that I could design a simple but fast protocol, but that is a little too difficult)

Are you restricted to software engineering? Are you willing to do any hardware type work? Im not suggesting it, but it really opens up the options.

I Like the idea of a protocol, thats a very wide open option because protocols are just rules that govern something. You could write some code to establish and use a serial communications link to some type of device. Use the link to exchange/grab data from it, ive always wanted to devel into that kinda stuff, but never really got initiative.

FIRENET

i always wanted to tdo it. implement tcp/ip on firewire (ieee1394). it would be fairly usefull for networking computers that are close to each other because its a great middle road between 10/100 and gigabit. and gigabit is still fairly expensive. the only downside is cable run.

Great ideas, thanks. I think I might do a protocol... I'll update when I decide.

Hmmm............. I've decided that a protocol is a good idea. But it has to be something cool, e.g. ip over firewire, and I've got no idea where to start. I'd like it if you could point me to the appropriate rfcs

[edit]
That's actually quite unreasnoble, I'll do it myself. Which ones should I look for though, firewire and TCP/IP?

[This message has been edited by skalez (edited 10-26-2002).]

ftp://ftp.rfc-editor.org/in-notes/rfc2734.txt

Oh poo, it's been done. Any other ideas? A protocol that doesn't need acks?

IP over firewire was done quite a while ago. The TCP/IP stack itself is fairly unchanged. It is not the TCP/IP implementation itself that was written, it was the interface between TCP/IP and firewire layer 2 stuff.

Anyways... a good protocol idea, hmmm maybe a protocol to communicate with a device? If you have any electronic devices that take input, you can control them by wiring them up to the serial port and building a protocol around their communication... or something like that... I'm not really helping.

Anyone know of any devices that are really narky to use?

or anything that annoys you about computers AT ALL???

The problem with a protocol is that you must find a communication need somewhere that has not been filled. How about you write a simple IPX like layer 3 protocol, but make it non-routable so you don't drown yourself, something like *shudder* NetBEUI.

[This message has been edited by cense (edited 10-29-2002).]

IP over audio.
Figure out a way to represent various octal or binary data sats aurally. Send it to a speaker, and stick a microphone across the room. Pump up the speaker, and turn on the mic, both of them being hooked up to a transmitting and recieving computer.

A scheme like this would allow you to store data on audio or video tape, burn it onto CD as a wav file. If you were to implement some sort of encryption it would go beyond obfuscation as a transmission scheme.

also, you could network two computers (albeit slowly) through audio cable...

IP over audio sounds like fun. I think I might do that. There's still a lot to think about though, so I'd better get to thinking.