When we were at the national maker fairer 2016, we saw tons of amazing inventions and incredible ideas. Among those inventions, we found an interesting one- the watt balance. The watt balance was built with Lego brick and functioned as a weighing scale. It roused our curiosity at the first sight.
Why would we weigh things with the watt balance instead of using a conventional scale? Our naïve question was soon solved after an engineer from NIST engineering laboratory explained to us. The watt balance is a redefined way of weighing. It uses the strength of an electric current and a voltage to measure the weight of an object. The problem of current weighing is that the unit of weight-kg is defined by an actual object and the mass of the actual object will change through time. The watt balance, on the contrary, can last beyond time.
The other insightful invention we saw at that day was a modular agriculture system. The designer of the system was a graduate student at UDC architecture program. She turned the food hub concept into a modular system which was consisted of production, preparation, distribution and resource recovery unit. The great thing about her system was that it could easily be delivered to any city or state in need.
