I am now in Burnaby, BC and have just started a 4 month work term with EA. I'm really pumped to be here and everything has been fun so far. EA is a very upbeat place to work. They have a lot of free-play arcade games, free coffee, people bring their dogs to work and there are lots of other perks. There's a friendly dog who's close to my desk. Sometimes he wanders over and I get to pet him. I've been assigned to the Need for Speed: World Online team. For those of you who don't know, Need for Speed is a racing game series that has been around since 1994. The game that I'm working on is a free-to-play massively multiplayer take on the series. So far it seems like my job will be focused around tool development for the game's database. I don't know if I'm allowed to say much more than that.
As a project for term 1 (Winter 2008) of the engineering program we had to design a product to solve a problem- any problem. Many members of my group were musicians, so we set out to design a device that would turn sheet music without the musician having to take their hands off their instrument. We came up with an incredible number of ideas and eventually settled on a design which involved an electromagnet(solenoid), a rotating arm, an Arduino microcontroller and a foot pedal. Paper clips would be placed on each page to turn through before operation. Pushing the button on the foot pedal would cause the solenoid to turn on (grabbing the next paper clip), rotate the arm (turning the page), deactivate the solenoid (letting go of the page) and turn the arm back. This worked fairly well, but occasionally multiple pages would get turned. To prevent this we added a servo motor and an arm to the bottom of the device. This would hold the pages down when necessary.
