When I went to College my major was Computer Electronics Engineering. The last year was geared to my TR. This is a project you build that is computer related. My TR (which won the TR of the year) was a remote control device over the phone to control devices. This was 1991. There were no Arduino, Raspberry pi etc. It was created with a limited CPU, RAM, EEprom, analog to digital device, telephone chip that can interpreted. I had at the time a new device that I could record my voice digitally and could just send a command to the device to play the recording depending on the address. I think this part made me win the award. There were other students that were building similar devices but no other had the voice part. The voice part helped the person on the call to control the device to hear “Press 1 to turn on device 1” etc. The others basically had to guess what the state of the device or had a high or low beep to tell the person what the state of the device. The biggest learning part at the time is this is how computers were built at the time. The programming of the device was all assembly. The issue back then was you do the program, send to an eeprom. Put the eeprom in the socket and hope for the best. This was the back bone of how computers were made.
Now you can do this with different hardware and software over the Internet in a very short time. I know because I built an Arduino with a wired shield to connect to the Internet. Connect a light to the Arduino and with a little website I could remote in from anywhere to connect to the Internet and control the Internet. I did not have the voice but did not need this since I had a website that told me the state of the device. It took me maybe 2 hours to create the program and get the website and Arduino going. It took me 4 months to get the TR project going in 1991. This is the differences of how computer tech has gotten better over the years!!
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