My Dumb Engineering Humour... Part Two

[danielwang]

Engineer Designs Most Complicated Washtub Ever
Mixing Sine Waves And Showers

What happens when you mix DaMieze Polytechnic alumni and temperature controllers? A TsunamiBox, the world most complicated shower, to be unveiled this weekend.

Enthused by efforts in his field to port Quake (a video game) to Japanese toilet controllers, Ray Fisher began his project with the initial goal of modifying the “firmware” on his Jacuzzi to allow temperature settings outside the allowed range.
When he discovered the “silly linear ramp-up” algorithms, he says, he was nothing short of inspired.

The TsunamiBox is the first shower of it’s kind, offering a variety of programmable features to take showing to the next level. Each user of the TsunamiBox will have a personal profile, stored locally, on a network, or on a metal iButton. The system will allow the user to select from popular built-in showering and bathing algorithms or even program their own. And by learning user averages, settings can be dynamically configured.

According to the inventor, he began the endeavor by consulting with colleagues in fields such as physiology and chemistry to determine the user impacts of certain aspects of showering. “People take longer, hotter showers on weekends and Fridays than other days” he concludes. “Hotter showers cleanse better by opening pores, and increase detergent effectiveness”. As for technology, it was rather simple for him to write a Verilog app and put it on an Altera chip.

Accessories for the TsunamiBox will include waterproof LCD touch-screen displays, infrared input sensors, and other peripherals. The standard TsunamiBox comes standard with a electronic shower head, flow controller and chemical mixer for dispensing sodium chloride and lactic acid, natural water softening and surfaction (tension reduction) agents. The next generation of TsunamiBoxes is to be powered by Pocket PCs running Windows .Net, which includes email, IM, SSH, Perl, and (of course) Quake. In his words, “I didn’t choose Linux because I didn’t want to get burned every time I got a seg fault. Those kernel panics can be real literal”.

As for Ray’s personal regime? “I begin with a tangent ramp up, followed by several cycles for washing and rinsing, with temperature being a function of a series of sines. A rapid transition to freezing cold water helps reduce vulnerability to airborne pathogens. Each cycle is times based on an average. Tones sound as a cycle ends, so I can extend a cycle or proceed early. It’s gotten quite good”.

Reports of buyout offers by Apple Computer and Moen have not been confirmed.