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BYU students build music, video machines |
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Friday, 08 April 2005 |
BYU
students build music, video machines
Provo Daily Herald - Provo,UT,USA
The light bulb, the television and the iPod were all created with at least one
element in common -- an inventor with a love for wires and technology.
Now after four or more years of studying the inner workings of software and
circuits, 15 BYU students are starting to create their own high-tech advances.
This semester they combined their brainpower and a lot of microchips to make "yPods."
They were challenged by their professor, Michael Wirthlin, to use a few standard
pieces of equipment and software and turn them into machines that play MP3 sound
files like iPods do and MPEG-2 video files like DVD players do.
"They had one semester to do it," Wirthlin said. "So it is not so much that they
learned more in this class, but they got to combine everything they have learned
in four years to make something. And then they also got some time to learn about
teamwork before they go out and get jobs."
The four teams each made players that were tested against each other Thursday
night at the annual engineering open house at Brigham Young University.
They competed side by side with other groups of students who created different
senior projects, such as wireless radio receivers and soccer-playing robots.
But while students have gathered to test their robots and radios against their
peers in past years, the "yPod" made its debut Thursday.
"yPod" developer and BYU senior Sam Caldwell worked with his team to create the
Super MPEG. Alongside the other teams, he plugged his project into to a computer
and the Internet and started running tests with a teammate before the
competition began Thursday night.
They played Jewel songs through the MP3 software and brought up video clips from
"Pirates of the Caribbean" through their MPEG-2 decoder.
When the contest started, each team had to run a series of timed tests. They
timed how long it took to download a "Mulan" clip, play a scene from "Shrek 2"
and play a song list of country tunes.
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