My patented chip. It took a full year to design and build and cost more than I’d care to say. For something that can fit in a matchbox and looks like a piece of broken glass, I probably lost 4000 hours of my life to it – and all it can do is allow laser light to travel 10cms and tell us what wavelengths the light is at.
It was a model of one of the buildings of my last company. It was for thesis in Queens Uni as well – I spent the the best part of 18 months on it. It could simulate (kind of like a video game) all of the different parts of the buildings, how it used energy depending on the time of day, the temperature outside, if there were people in the building, if the doors or windows were open. We used it to test different energy saving measures (e.g. replacing doors with a different type, installing a wind turbine on site, storing energy to be used at other times). From the results we picked 18 energy changes and made them in the building and saved around €180,000 in electricity costs in one year.
The Mountlucas wind farm project took a huge effort by me. That project took two years to go from conception to planning application.
A second project that took huge effort from me was my construction studies project for my leaving cert. I work all weekend every weekend building a lathe. It was finally finished in time. I used to do a lot of wood turning. I designed the lathe with a four foot between centres. The bed also could be pulled out to make very large bowls. I got a set of variable speed pulleys from a scrap yard which allowed the speed of rotation to be changed on the move.
I spent three years building a machine just to read current and voltage. In the end I had to scrap it and just buy one. It was hard to admit defeat. The machine was going to measure the efficiency of the solar cells I made and store the readings. Unfortunately the currents were too low for the many many prototypes I built and we had to buy the really expensive machine in the end. I lost so many hours and I felt a bit of a failure. However, it taught me how the machine was supposed to work and this came in use when I went to program it for my special requirements.
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