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Freshman MIT Students Automate Dorm Room
Inessa writes "Two freshman MIT students have automated their dorm room, complete with a big red party button which generates an instant party. Their custom-engineered system is called MIDAS, the Multi-Function In Dorm Automation System. According to the MIT News office, "Gone are the light switches and glaring fluorescent lights of a typical dorm room. Zack Anderson and RJ Ryan's room has several lighting schemes, remote web access, voice activation, a security system, electric blinds and more ... With the touch of one red button, their dorm room becomes a rave. The lights go out, the blinds close, the displays read, "feel the energy" as a voice repeats the same phrase over a deep bass beat.""
And I mean that in the good way, not in the bad at sports way.
I'd like to get in on a piece of those sales.
This inculcation of curiosity and resourcefulness is what makes studying at MIT truly unique. No wonder it is one of the premier educational institutions in the world.
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Concept is nice, but really, in a dorm room of that size the party mode is pretty useless. Adapt it to a basement/dining room, and we can talk.
Wuwu, party for two.
they couldn't solve the "where do we get chicks from?" problem. or maybe, these oxygen gas bottles are of some use after all..
Why, when we were in college, we couldn't afford to have all of that expensive automation gear. We had to get up off of our asses and actually turn lights off on and on, and we liked it that way. In-room fridge? Hah! We were so poor, we had to keep a little piece of Velveeta frozen on the dorm room window sill, saving it up for our big Friday night celebrations. But tell that to kids today, and they won't believe you. No sir.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
We know where the girls are not on campus.
Not the "Midas Touch" but the "Nerd Touch".
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
Why is it I get the feeling that there is a reason these guys have that much time on their hands?
Nice work and all that, but most decent parties at college include three staple ingredients
1) Alcohol
2) Women
3) Alcohol
Though alcohol appears twice this is on purpose, once to get you drunk enough to ask, then a woman to ask, the second to get her drunk enough to agree. Now an automated party system that achieved that... the guys would be millionaires by next Wednesday.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
I bet their dorm room still smells like dirty laundry.
the party button pushes you!
Build it and they will come... Or was that baseball?
Deleted
While they're at it, they'd better install that Korean female robot wearing something slinky - because they'll never get any real women in there... and at least she won't collapse in hysterics when told to "feel the energy"...
All programmers are lazy. Why do people program? To make things easier... because we're lazy!
The post on the MIDAS web page dates of Added on May 08, 2006, 03:50 PM...
I wouldn't mind you in my head, if you weren't so clearly mad -Lews Therin Telamon
Isn't this a repost from a few months back? I guess all that partEing made the geeks lap in memory. ;)
Given a few thousand dollars to blow, what comp sci or engineer students *couldn't* rig up some stupid $#it like this?
... thanks dad!
The only thing these guys have got going on is obviously some serious bankrole
Wow! Look at all the girls come running!
But with all the equipment lying around I would be afraid to have a rave in there.. Think of all the damage that could be dealt to the set-up! Maybe for their next project they could have the walls open up and have the floors slide into them along with the equipment on them(Will only work with huge hollow spaces between the walls, say large enough for a huge mutated rat to fit nicely). And then find some people who would be crazy enough to dance in there!
Hey, 1989 called, they want their party terms back...
I like the tape recorder saying stuff in a female voice like "What a nice set ballpoints you have?!", "Obesity makes me hot!" and "With you, olfact is what it should be in a mate selection process."
Couldn't resist.
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
the "off" button.
The lights go out, the blinds close, the displays read, "feel the energy" as a voice repeats the same phrase over a deep bass beat."
Appearantly, these "freshmen" haven't been out of their dorm room since the early 90's
Arrogance is Confidence which lacks integrity. -- me
"feel the energy" . . . I'll bet THAT never gets old!
Adherence to the truth is a form of disloyalty.
Now comes the hard part: make friends to utilize their party room.
These guys have been 'aving it tiny in a smaller venue for rather longer: The Miniscule of Sound at 1.99 m2! (gallery here)Come back when you've got it in a broom cupboard....
It's articles like this that really make me bitter about going to a crappy state school where students amuse themselves by dropping dorm room furnature down stairwells.
I wish I were at MIT. I think I'd really flourish there. I just wasn't enough of a super-genius to get there, and thus I'm stuck.
I read about this 18 days ago...since when did /. become so slow? I'm a consistent reader and all, but this is a little disappointing.
I read about this 18 days ago...since when did /. become so slow? I'm a consistent reader and all, but this is a little disappointing.
http://www.engadget.com/2006/05/11/mit-students-au tomate-dorm-room-add-party-mode/
Someone gets in through remote web access and continually makes it party mode.
sent from my slashdot browser.
I am pretty sure the same button inflates their "girlfriends" as well!
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
I want to install some automation devices in my new house. I'll be seeing what I can take from this article. ;)
[%] Cingular Ringtones
It's all a nice setup, but when happens when these kids have to move out of that dorm? (Due to a pile of dirty laundry growing legs and chewing on wires)
After running a few LAN parties, I know full well, set up is half the time of take down.
So assuming these boys have been at this whole Dorm Party System for a couple of months, dare I say a year? How are they going to take all this down?
I bet everything has been screwed or nailed in, modified and altered to accommodate all this equipment. Who allowed them to do this? Last time I checked you weren't allowed to mess around with dorm rooms.
So are they going to sell the whole system to the school as an example to future students how useful MIT is? Or will they sell it to another group of freshmen?
They are going to have to move out sooner or later. I feel bad for the system. Its either going to be torn down or abused as a teaching resource.
Nice system and all, but -10 practicality. Maybe it would have worked better in a house or apartment. They should have worked more in how it looked and how it was to be set up instead of just building it.
With some planning they could have made some money, but I won't mess up my dorm and forfeit my damage payment for the system.
-10 Practicality, -5 Damage Deposit, +5 L337ness...
You can watch a video here of it in action.
And this makes slashdork news exactly WHY ?
Wish they did shit like this in my dorms. Props fellows.
we had to keep a little piece of Velveeta frozen on the dorm room window sill
When I went to school, Velveeta hadn't been invented yet. We had to walk in all manner of weather conditions to the vetrinary science buildings, uphill both ways, and steal milk from the cows, which we then had to curdle in the bathroom sink. Only then could a Friday night celebration be had.
paintball
As a student, I don't have the money to go buying lots of expensive hardware (but I wish I did...) so how do these guys? Oh, and the text to phone alarm thing, wasn't that in Veronica Mars?
How long before this is retailing on Think Geek?
Skot Nelson music is my saviour / i was maimed by rock and roll
At a single voice command the door swings shut and locks, bars secure the window, the lights dim, room oxygen is reduced by 20% creating a lightheadedness, and the audio system repeats the phrase "Give in, you know you want me".
Is it just me, or is this 10x as complex and imperceptibly better than "hey, lets get a bunch of x10 shit and control our $300 party lights".
The disco dance floor guys did it sooo much better than this gimmick. And they had a girl!
[Been there (MIT), seen that. Some of the most amazing projects were done by students who never completed their studies. Of course, many of them went on to be entrepreneurial millionaires, while the rest of us became 9-5 drones...]
"party mode" also involves 2 guys with bras on their heads and a barbie doll.
Quickies. Empty classrooms. The shower. Behind the bushes. Right on the main campus lawn if she has the right kind of skirt or dress... not that I'd know about THAT one. :-)
Usually you can pay extra to ditch the roommate, but this may involve a much longer walk to class. If the school is uncrowded and/or you claim to have some sort of mental issue (Asperger's, severe ADD, etc.) you might be able to get a regular double to yourself, with or without paying double.
Many places have dorms for married students, regularly visited by the stork.
Weird, if you'd spelt out almost any other countries name you'd have been modded up....far too many people here on slashdot have a very limited sense of humour.
Does it run Linux?
Problem is, those usually aren't the good women. (a brainy guy wants a brainy gal -- an IQ difference of more than 30 points makes a relationship very awkward and painful)
The good ones are often to distracted by their own academic success to think about starting a family. They have a meaningless career, then panic at age 40 when they realize that menopause is coming soon. Whoops. Should have thought about that earlier.
Anyone can do this! MIT my ass Computer with speakers Neons (Coorslight deli signs work) Ikea lamps Now connect everything to the same power strip and done! THis guys really need to get laid or drunk or something.
It's called drugs and rap music. More fun and more portable!
friends. Although, judging from how they've tricked out their room, they're probably in short supply of those.
I'm sorry. The number you have reached is imaginary. Please rotate your phone 90 degrees and try again.
I lived at home and worked full time through college (at a much cheaper school than MIT) and picked and chose carefully which books I bought (I have copied whole textbooks in the library at 5 cents/page.) We all had our dreams then, but we knew that's all they were.
All this seems a tad excessive in order to try to impress girls? That is the point to all this, right? or am i missing the mark? -wrath
Sillie Frosh.... I remember when I used to be into crazy stuff like that, with a PC pimped out with lights and loud fans and all that crap...... I eventually got over it though....... Although that is controllable, and that makes a big difference. I personally think it's cool too, although the party mode would be overkill for me. I guess it is this sort of motivation that makes an MIT student though.
In undeveloped countries, the consumer controls the market. In capitalist America, the market controls you.
You don't live in Boston, so you don't hear about what MIT is often in the news for: students getting really hammered, and occasionally falling out of dorm room windows and getting killed.
MIT has a huge problem with drug abuse- and that includes alcohol. Having lived in the same city as MIT for over a decade, I'm not really sure why everyone thinks MIT is the greatest technical school in the world...it's not even close. I've spoken to a lot of managers at high-tech companies that won't hire fresh MIT grads because a)they don't know anything actually useful and b)they think they know everything, so when they're doing something wrong, they don't listen to coworkers, team leaders, and managers.
My favorite example is the manager who told me about the MIT programmer he hired that wouldn't use constants...he's plug in the same number 50 times in his algorithm, instead of defining a properly named constant...and his variable names were hilariously bad. Basically, it was clear he never learned proper programming techniques. Despite the manager's insistence that he define constants, etc (ie follow company coding standards), the guy kept doing it his way.
So he was fired. Ever wonder why so many MIT grads work for other MIT grads? It's because they're un-employable by anyone else.
Please help metamoderate.
These kids have too much money...
Ryan - http://www.thecosmotron.com/
Otherwise they would've been running Linux.
I wonder how they can sleep with that background noise in their room (or even learn). I guess their party mode button made them allready deaf. ;)
The "party" movie? Started out looking like amateur gay porn to me.
I showed the clip to my wife and the only thing she said was "They don't have partys" and walked out.
MIT nerds make lights and sounds appear with the touch of a button. Where's the story? If they could get girls to appear, now that would be a story!
FTFA: "... 3 video cameras, one of which is on continuous recording mode..." I don't know about the rest of you guys, but the idea of being under constant surveillance would make me a little freaked out. I mean, imagine if one of these guys DOES have a girlfriend (remote chance, I know...) and he brings her back to the room for some alone time while his roomie is away. There is no privacy in that room. I would suggest having a "no surveillance" mode where all cameras and recording equipment get shut off.
according to inside sources at ThinkGeek, dorm automation packages will be ready to ship beginning of the second quarter next year (April 1, 2007)
"This inculcation of curiosity and resourcefulness is what makes studying at MIT truly unique. No wonder it is one of the premier educational institutions in the world."
I read "inculcation" as "inoculation", and was hoping you could provide me with information on the curative properties of binge drinking and pot smoking...
Of course they made it a red button... that's always the button you're never supposed to press.
As a college student and a full-time employee, I find it incredibly difficult to keep up with things. There are dozens of cool ideas I'd love to implement, but they sit on the back burner due to lack of time and money. Maybe these two are like the many freshman I see on campus. Mommy and Daddy pay for everything. So they blow off their studies, have no major financial debts, and four years later have no degree. But hey, they did do this awesome party room!
well, if this wasn't mit it wouldn't be in the news, /. or otherwise.
I would however like to throw out to whomever listening that the interesting between-the-lines of all this is that this sort of DIY, as easy as this particular project was, behavior is not only tolerated but celebrated at MIT. where I went to college, a little place call Moravian, the students were barely literate. In fact they were stupid. Which wouldn't be so bad if they were all women and attractive, but they weren't. Building such a device would confuse the troglodytes that roamed about and perhaps induce rage.
sometimes i wonder how different my life would have been if i went to MIT, not considering whether or not i'm MIT material in the first place. The college I went to was so bad that I think I got dumber by attending. People I could learn from or network with later in life were few and far between, and the kind of experimentation that inspires technical thought leadership was shunned and in fact punished if brought into the classroom.
It's almost as if the social impact of computing is in fact as imporant as the craft itself.
"The system is down! The system is down!"
"Hey The Cheat! I told you, no more light switch raves!"
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
as a voice repeats the same phrase over a deep bass beat
Needs more cowbell...
My buddy Chris built the "BITCH" at MIT's ILG Fenway House. It stands for Bathroom Integrated Tracking something something, he tortured an innocent acronym to make it. Anyway, in a classic Boston Brownstone (right on the Fens, beautiful) they have 4 bathrooms and up to 25 people. So, each floor has a box with LEDs that light up when different bathrooms are in use. No indication of when the automatic Out-of-TP warning lights go in.
And what's kitchen pantry without an Athena terminal? 8)
gigantino.tv - Heavy but weighs nothing.
The lights go out, the blinds close, the displays read, "feel the energy" as a voice repeats the same phrase over a deep bass beat.
You obviously can't teach good taste.
if(!toilet_paper) roll.replace(new roll);
Rich bastards :-p
...Now accepting donations for me :-)
I'm jealous!
HIS car computer was about $1000 US AND installed in a older BMW.
All my dreams he has done (carputer, go karts, touchscreen entertainment systems), due to him and/or his family having such money.
-jhp
/. -- the Free Republic of technology.
...I'll build my own party button. With blackjack. And hookers.
So when were Mitch and Chris planning on sneaking Kent's car into his dorm room? Or freezing the floors into ice?
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089886/
"But this one goes to 11!"
Dude.. how do we get the chicks to over look the camera's....
Walcott, Bemis, or Goodale?
I used to be a beast from the east. Goodale 210.
Is that still what they call it? We used to
field the most teams for IM sports around,
including two basketball teams.
There used to be a heavy bag in the south lounge,
the one without the kitchen.
Cool years gone by.
*cough* Sounds _practical_!
-M
when you see the word 'Linux', drink!
Forget the party button and the blackjack.
This clip screams "Real Genius."
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089886/
You only find this stuff at EC. After 4 years here at MIT, EC is definitely the most unique group of students. I have to give them credit for the creativity they have, from the disco floor, to their annual rollercoaster during rush, to their naked parties. If you think of MIT students you think of EC. Although, there are "normal" students and "normal" parties at MIT. Baker has the best dorm parties, EC the most unique, Senior Haus the most drug-filled, but they all contribute to the great diversity at MIT.
Go karts aren't that great. I had one when I was maybe 12 years old. I saved up for a couple years and paid most of the cost myself. Luckily, we had a big yard (1 acre), and a couple times my dad took me and the go kart somewhere else to ride.
Once, the centrifugal clutch got full of mud and jammed in the engaged position. My dad chased the riderless kart around the yard and tackled it, hurting his thumb in the process.
If you're a licensed driver, you could conceivably find a place to ride whenever you want, but at that point, it becomes more fun to just drive somewhere and do something else, possibly with other people. Plus, you'd need more horsepower to get an exciting ride, due to additional weight; and if it's a modern kart with a roll cage, you'll need it tall enough for your height.
Hell, for the cost of a go kart, you could do a lot of riding at a commercial go kart track on one that you don't have to fix, fuel, or pull the start cord...and get to race against other people too.
I suppose if you live near a forest with lots of trails that allow motorized vehicles...but then you'd want something with more ground clearance, designed for rough terrain.
Procrastination -- because good things come to those who wait.
The first rave happened in the 1960s. Here's audio-visual evidence
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
if they're anything like "our kind" then creating an automatic partying system is pretty redundant if you're using it for your own dorm... :P
One of the most depressing but yet accurate statements I have every heard came from my SCUBA instructor. This guy was in the Canadian Forces and was the Canadian equivalent of the US Navy Seals.
:-(
After going cavern diving one day he told me:
"Women control half of the money, and all the sex in the world".
I want to slit my wrists
Libertas in infinitum
I just heard of the system, havent actually seen it... but if it's as I heard it is, imo it's a far superior party system.
From what I heard: some students at harvey mudd made something which impressed me more in terms of automating parties... it simply mixes drinks. And by simply I mean it could hold something like a dozen different types of boozes and you could give it a drink name it had programmed and it would pour and mix the correct amounts of the various alcohols(and non-alcoholic beverages should one desire). iirc it could also measure fluid levels and know which drinks it could or couldnt make based on how much of each alcohol it had left.
Sure, the MIT system touches on more things. But blinds, music, lights, party effects(especially if it's a pre-existing single system with basically on/off) are all really simple things to do, even when inebriated.
On the other hand streamlining the process of making drinks is nice with a larger croud. Second, always being able to quickly mix up a good drink is an honest improvement over what an inibriated person could do easily/quickly.
So, as far as parties, imo the harvey mudd system does more for you, even tho it touches on fewer different systems.
Its cool to look at, but the real question is, are they actually putting it to use? -Photoud.com
The chicks are geeks. Some of them are probably reading this now, and hoping to have a chance to check it out. .... Like most geeks the chicks at MIT will want to see upgrades, new versions and bugfixes.
Have you really seen this???
Sounds too good to be true.
Except the room will be my own bedroom in my house, I have a 20' ceiling so I built a second floor in the room that attaches to the attic. I'm buying a few old web cams, going to convert a few of them to show infrared light for nightvision type use, them I'm going to put infrared LEDs inside the room so I can take video with the lights out. There will be a switch to open and close XMMS, LCD screen and keypad to jump to songs, I'd be able to search through songs from the couch without taking out the mouse and keyboard. There's going to be a skylight that's motorized with a motorized screen too. A 56" Sony HDTV, I'm hooking it up to my computer, and PS3. Also going to get a nice stereo once I figure out which one to get. It'll have more appeal to females because it's not a dorm room at MIT, plus I have a bar that I built in my room, it's nice doing this stuff in your dorm, but even nicer in your own home :-).
steal milk from the cows, which we then had to curdle in the bathroom sink.
When I went to school, the cow hadn't even been domesticated! We had to capture wild buffalo and breed them over and over again. You kids don't appreciate the hard work we had to do so you could milk 'cows'. And a bathroom? Don't get me started.
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
Once again freshman prove they have the right stuff...
to be total losers.
Oh, I forgot....everyone needs a "party" button because the average lame a$$ isn't capable of selecting music, turning out the lights or making bass noises.
their robot's mouth
http://web.mit.edu/zacka/www/sara.html
doesnt have an uncanny resemblance to a blow up doll. and what do you think that robotic arm is used for?
http://www.livejournal.com/users/cixel
I'm not sure if the nerdy-coolness of it all is making me see things that aren't there... but... is that a vagina on the big screen in the party mode activation video?
It's Flash. Flash sucks. And it sure aint video.
install one of these babies in the hatch
just think about it, a party every 108 minutes!
Gentlemen, the way to get laid is to learn guitar.
333rd yeah!@ woohoo.
If you just look at women as sexual objects then I'm sure you'll end up with someone who will be manipulative. On the other hand, if you actually like women, and are careful in your selection process, you might actually find something more meaningful.
"sweet dreams are made of this..."
This is almost as cool as my lava lamp was back in the '60s.
We must be alert to the danger that public policy could become captive to a scientific-technological elite. - Eisenhower
We weren't even allowed to put blue-tac up on the walls in my day.
At least, that's my first impression.
Hey, maybe they're working tirelessly on their education, and have several patents that are the source of plentiful royalties, or something.
But I'm skeptical at this point.
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.
Big deal. We did this back in 1970 in West Quad at the U of Mich, with black light flourescent tubes, a really cool theramin, a light show that was actually the visual recording level-meter from a torn-apart reel-to-reel tape recorder..the whole babe magnet thing. Unlike these wimps, the highest tech item we had was a 40 watt RMS Lafayette Radio stereo receiver. We also discovered that when we wanted the instant party to end (a critical feature they apparently DO NOT DEAL WITH) we could put on Procol Harum and within 5 minutes the room would be cleared! Something about the lyrics; 'The corpses were rotten..' 5 karma points to whoever correctly identifies the song and the album..
...that these 2 engineering students at MIT are the LEAST likely to actually NEED a "party mode" in their dorm room.....
My first Course VI class at MIT, they didn't even really teach the programming language they used. You pretty much had to pick it up on your own, the lectures were on much deeper topics than how to code "Hello world".
And I call BS on the GP that the programmer wouldn't use constants for love nor money. There couldn't be anything else involved?
We had a simular system for our Quake Team Fortress Gamer system at a former company I was employed at in the 1990s. One of our engineers Ben Kamen took the results of our noon Quake frag fests and would broadcast the top 15 frag list on a LED marque sign. We also had the Web-Page score history online. He designed an Auto-Quake system that started at 12:00 - 1:00pm and for after hours play 5:00pm. It was awesome! Those signs have been around for a while. He was the first to use the LED Marque sign in our office Quake automation system.