Portfolio
Swimming Resistance Trainer
This year 3 classmates and myself will be designing and building a device that will allow competetive swimmers to add a variable amount of resistance to their swimming. I'll be the electrical and software designer for the project. We'll be interfacing our project with a PC using USB, which will enable charting of progress and will provide an additional interface to the training tool. The project should be quite a challenge, but I'm confident we can pull it off. More on this as we complete more of the design and construction.
www.RyanHildebrandt.com
The website you're looking at right now is a product of my desire to learn HTML, CSS, and PHP. I designed the interface with the input of some of my peers, but the rest of the code and design was done as I taught myself the technology. You may notice that the left hand navigation and top title bar are consistent across all pages on this site. It's actually just one page that gets cached by your browser. This helps the page load faster. I've also used CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) to separate the style of the pages from the content. Not only does this allow me to make style changes for the entire site very quickly and easily, but it makes the whole design much cleaner and easier to understand (from both a human perspective, and also for search engines)
Nut Sorter
As a part of our 3rd year design course, we designed a mechanism to sort (hardware) nuts by both size and material (3 sizes, brass and steel nuts). My other teammates focused on the mechanical design and software design, while my main contribution was sensor calibration, electrical design, and testing. The sensors we were given were quite low quality, but we managed to make our design work quite well.
GrebelQuote! Facebook Application
The residence I stay at in Waterloo (Conrad Grebel) has quite an active social life, and it is quite a lighthearted place. When someone says something embarassing, awkward, or strange, they are "Grebelquoted". Basically, someone remembers what they said, posts it to the student website, and we all get to have a laugh. With the advent of Facebook, the use of the student website had been slowly declining and so had the occurence of GrebelQuotes. To solve this problem, I used the Facebook API to create a GrebelQuote application. The application allows users to submit GrebelQuotes, and it uses the Facebook framework to send notifications to "GrebelQuoted" users, and place a small box on their profile page with their most recent GrebelQuote. Since its release in February, much of the Grebel community has embraced this application, and a few have made suggestions in terms of features they'd like to see, bug fixes, and praise.
JobMine Usability Script
The co-op program at UW has an online job database that both students and employers use, called JobMine. The software runs on PeopleSoft, and has a few usability problems in my opinion. For example, each time a user logs in they need to click on 3 successive links to get to the main menu before they can do anything useful. I saw this was a problem, so I taught myself JavaScript and wrote this simple script that eliminates this usability problem. It hasn't been advertised outside of my class and immediate group of friends but has over 200 users.
APEGGA Popsicle Stick Bridge Competition
In grade 12 myself and 2 classmates decided to enter a popsicle stick bridge building competition. We had to span a 36cm gap, and would be judged on the ratio of the static load the bridge could hold and the mass of the bridge (using only popsicle sticks and white glue). Despite having no civil engineering experience (only our common sense) we placed 2nd in the province (our bridge was able to hold 173 pounds).
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Special thanks to Michael Purvis for hosting