This week six third-year students of the school of Electrical, Electronic and Computer Engineering and Mechanical Engineering have once again shown what the Faculty of Engineering of the Puk Campus is capable of when they were selected the overall winners of the Siemens Cyber Junkyard competition for industrial automation.
The students’ entry, a coffee machine of industrial quality, showed nine other invited university teams from Southern Africa how many beans make five. Earlier this year they succeeded in becoming one of the final teams in this competition aimed at all tertiary institutions in Southern Africa where engineering is presented. Teams as far as Zambia had entered.
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The NWU Puk’s Cyber Junkyard winners with their winning coffee machine that delivers your hot drink per robot. In the back row: Mr. Abrie Nieuwoudt and Mss. Tanya Steyn and Adelle Bouwer. In the front row: Messers Piet van Huyssteen, lecturer in computer engineering, Pieter Goosen, Wichert Huyser and Frikkie van Zyl.
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The winners were selected Tuesday (28 October) evening during a prestigious occasion in Johannesburg attended by more than four hundred experts in industry. Since 2006 it is the second time that students of the NWU Puk win the competition. The previous winning entry was a machine that manufactures keys and pieces them together.
According to Prof. Jan de Kock, director of the school of Electrical, Electronic and Computer Engineering, the students initially had to submit a proposal for the selection process, after which they had to design and build the coffee machine. Certain requirements entailed that the machine receives a request for coffee via remote control, makes the coffee and delivers it per robot to the client who is a distance from the machine, per robot.
Although certain equipment was provided, the students manufactured the system themselves and wrote complicated computer programmes for it. The instrument makers on the campus made some of the parts.
The NWU Puk’s successful team did the work under the guidance of Mr. Piet van Huyssteen, lecturer in computer engineering. As winners, the team members, Adelle Bouwer, Tanya Steyn, Abrie Nieuwoudt, Pieter Goosen, Wichert Huyser and Frikkie van Zyl, secured R50 000’s worth of engineering equipment for the NWU Puk. Furthermore, each of the students was awarded a lap top computer and will attend a conference at Sun City in June free of charge as part of their reward. The group is also afforded the opportunity of receiving advanced training over a period of 21 days from Siemens, the main sponsor of the competition.
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