Technorama

This Saturday I went to Technorama in Winterthur on an IAESTE event. It was sort of like the Swiss version of Questacon. Check out the video below for some of the random things that I filmed.

The Lightning display was a fairly big let-down for the most part (it went for about 30mins but the only cool bits were in that video). But the Tesla coils were definitely worth the wait. After Ode to Joy they also played Smoke on the Water - the frequency is changed by increasing how many times it arcs in a second.

The Mindball game had me really excited when I first saw it. It was pretty impressive. Until I won about 5 games in a row so we started testing the system to see how it works. Turns out the game still runs with nobody hooked up to it and the “brain waves” are just as random.

They had a transparent gearbox which was pretty cool to see how it physically worked.

They had a electic bike set-up similar to one we designed for a group project at uni. Except we never made ours and it wasn’t as good. They had several different applicances hooked up so you could see how fast you needed to pedal to produce enough power for them to work. The LCD TV was suprisingly easy to power, boiling water and powering some LED floodlights was much more difficult.

They also had a table full of gas in which you could see particle collisions taking place, which were like little minature explosions, was pretty impressive.

It was a an educational and interesting day. At the end of the day we had a bloody freezing walk to the train station, and froze on the platform waiting for a train. I can understand why people don’t like Winter here, but so far I still love the snow :)