Students Take Credit for New DirecTV Device
Some college students invent products to start their own companies and strike it rich. At Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, some of the country’s top engineering students invent real products for class credit.
A group of six undergraduates developed a portable meter for satellite TV broadcaster DirecTV so that the company’s technicians could measure the quality of the signals received by its customers’ satellite dishes. The students, working with adjunct professor of engineering Cal Baumgaertner, built a prototype of a hand-held digital signal meter in less than a year.
DirecTV took the prototype to several manufacturers and asked them to come up with a plan to produce the meter based on the Harvey Mudd design. At least one of them is planning to start production this year, according to DirecTV engineer Dave Kuether.
“The HMC project’s outcome was better than we expected,” Kuether said. “We received a lot of positive feedback from the installers when they saw the pre-production prototype.”
Were the students paid a handsome fee, or rewarded with DirecTV stock options? Nope. As part of Harvey Mudd’s Clinic Program, all they got is college credit. But the school pocketed a cool $36,000.
