The EOS 450D features:

• 12.2 Megapixel CMOS sensor
• Canon’s EOS Integrated Cleaning System
• 3.5 frames per second3.0” LCD with Live View shooting
• 9-point wide-area AF system with f/2.8 cross-type centre point
• Picture Style image processing parameters
• DIGIC III image processor
• Digital Photo Professional RAW processing software
• Compact and Lightweight body
• Fully compatible with all Canon EF and EF-S lenses and EX-series Speedlites
• 14 bit A/D converter and processing
• Multi-shot self-timer mode
• Highlight Tone Priority (from 40D)
• Auto Lighting Optimiser (boosts shadows after shooting)
• Redesigned battery grip (BG-E5)

 As posted by Mhondyhondy:

Best in Technology Honorable Mention
PDA Mobot
Adamson University
Arian Hero Napa, Eugenio Piñon, Marion Anthony Bugnot,
Jay Christian Merle, Reymond Cielo
adviser:
Engr. Alain Bernard Rañola

PDA is a term for any small mobile handheld device that provides computing and information storage and retrieval capabilities for personal or business use, often for keeping schedule calendars and address book information handy. This device is use in video recording, word processing, and Global Positioning System (GPS). Many PDA can access internet, intranet or extranet via Wi-Fi, or Wireless Wide-Area Networks (WWAN). A typical PDA has a touch screen for entering data and a memory card slot for data storage and IrDA, Bluetooth and WIFI for wireless connectivity.

PDA can be use in different application through its wireless connectivity. It can be use in a remote control application. Robots today are controlled by personal computers and laptops but then, it is too much bulky for the user to bring their personal computer just to control their robot. PDAs are small and powerful, leveraging the best technology that can be offered today in the palm of your hand. They make for perfect robotic controllers, as they can be easily expanded through their expansion slots. The culmination of this project will provide you with the know-how to control robotic device through the used of PDA.

The group had developed a “PDA controlled robot” that will use in search and rescue operations. The robot has its robotic arm for getting of samples in a place where chemical substances are health hazards to human being.
Quantity Material Amount
1 Bluetooth Module P 2350.00 P 2350.00
1 PDA 9000.00 9000.00
2 Wheel motor 450.00 900.00
3 Tormax 700.00 2100.00
2 Grip motor 150.00 300.00
2 Back wheels 350.00 700.00
2 Front wheels 35.00 70.00
1 Wireless camera 1000.00 1000.00
1 Microcontroller 491.00 491.00
10 Battery 72.00 720.00
8 Super bright -LED 15.00 120.00
4 L293D 20.00 80.00

TOTAL COST P 17831.00

I’m sure everyone is very familiar with this good old cheap multimeter on the market. I first bought my DT-830B digital multimeter wayback in 1995 when I was still in first year college. That was my first multimeter in our home and I was quite super excited to the point that I measured the resitance of every resistor I have on my cabinet. My DT-830B’s brand name is Xinle (made in china) and it cost around 800 pesos circa 1995. Today, I have seen alot of DT-830 Bs with different brand names, some are KYK branded
and others doesn’t even have a brand name but all that was
printed on the casing is DT-830.

These testers can be bought for as low as 100 pesos on those chinese discount stores.  From my experience, the only problem I encountered with the chinese made DT-830Bs is that they have low quality probes and it is quite
useless when measuring low resistance parts such as wirings.
The internal resistance of the free probes is just too high for
low resistance measurement. The build quality is just
average and I haven’t encountered a bad unit yet after
using 2 of them for almost a year.

Capacitor ESR or Electrical Series Resistance is the sum of all in-phase AC resistance of a capacitor. This includes the resistance of the plate, dielectric, electrolyte solution and even the resistance of the terminal leads at one particular frequency. It is electrically equivalent to a resistor connected in series with the capacitor as the name implies. A perfect capacitor will have a zero in-phase resistance or zero ESR. ESR is an indication of the capacitor’s build quality, the lower the ESR the higher the quality.

Motherboards and power supplies utilizing high frequency AC use LOW ESR capacitors to prevent high power dissipation. The classic power dissipation formula “I squared times R” will show you that your capacitor will generate more heat if you increase its resistance (ESR). Low quality capacitors employed in high frequency applications
will often have high ESR causing too much heat build up and would eventually cause the capacitor to bulge and self-destruct. This is the classic example of bulging capacitors on a motherboard as seen on this picture.

Best in Technology 1st place
accelerometer sensor array column for slope stability monitoring
UPD
by:
Rudolf Dumo,Earl Anthony Mendoza,Wilfredo Sepulchre
advisers:
Marc Talampas, MSEE,Michael Lochinvar Abundo, MSEE

Best in Technology Runner-Up
Sugpo: Mobile Robot Platform
UPD
Lawrence Y. Lee,Oliver John N. Tizon
adviser:
Engr. Menandro D. Roxas

Best in Technology Honorable Mention
PDA Mobot
Adamson University
Arian Hero Napa,Eugenio Piñon,Marion Anthony Bugnot,
Jay Christian Merle, Reymond Cielo
adviser:
Engr. Alain Bernard Rañola

Most Commercializable 1st Place
Axel Activity Monitor
UPD
Raissa Aranas,Virna Mae Dizon,Stephen Alfred Quedi
advisers:
Engr. Michael Lochinvar Abundo, MS EE,Engr. Marc Caesar Talampas, MS EE

Most Commercializable Runner-Up
TexTag : RFID Tracking System for TB Kits
UPD/Ateneo
Rosanno JC de Dios,Earl Anthony Mendoza
& Joshoua C. Esmenda, Mark Andrew S. Mateo
advisers:
Michael Lochinvar Abundo, MSEE, Joel Joseph Marciano Jr PhD
& Dr. Nathaniel Libatique

Most Promising Team 1st Place
FLASH FLOOD EARLY WARNING DEVICE
Mindanao State University - General Santos City
Lovely Joy C. Decatoria, Ivy R. Entea, Jay Paulo E. Macoy
adviser:
ENGR. DIOGENES ARMANDO PASCUA

Most Promising Team Runner-Up
Microcontroller-based Proportional-Integral-Differential (PID)
Notre Dame of Dadiangas University
Mark Timothy B. Honor
adviser:
Engr. Franz Duran

Source: http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/microdesigncontest/message/2166

The standard smoke detector costing about 300 pesos on your local hardware is the ionization type smoke detector. It is the cheapest type of home smoke detector utilizing the radioactive Americium-241 to detect the presence of smoke. Americium emits alpha particles which makes the air inside the smoke detector unit partially conductive.  Smoke particles absorb alpha particles and increases the
resistance of the air inside the smoke detector. The rise in the
electrical resistance of the air is detected by the ASIC and then it triggers a piezoelectric horn.

Ionization type smoke detectors are cheap and accurate but you may be concerned about AM-241 which actually emits
radioactive particles inside your home. FDA says that the
alpha particles emitted by the standard smoke detector is lesser than the amount you are going to get from sun exposure.

On the other hand, photoelectric
smoke detectors use an LED and a photodetector combination. The photodetector senses the presense of light that is reflected by the smoke particles and triggers an alarm unit. Early photoelectric smoke detectors are prone to false
alarms because of dust build up. Newer ASICs from TI, Allegro and other manufacturers  resulted in a more accurate and cheaper photoelectric smoke detectors.

It is important to note that ionization and photelectric detectors detect different types of smoke. Ionization type is more sensitive on smoke particles with small sizes that usually comes from high temperature fires while the photoelectric type is sensitive to large sized smoke particles coming from slow, smouldering fires.

A good photodiode should have fast response, large surface are, small capacitance
and of course low cost. I’ve been looking for a good photodiode here in Philippines and BPW34 is the best thing around. It is available in two versions, a visible light version which is packaged into a water clear casing (BPW34) and an infrared version which has a visible light cutoff filter (BPW34F). It features a 7.5 square millimeter sensitive area, responsivity of 0.62 A/W @ 850nm. The really nice thing is that it costs only about 80 pesos. Photodiodes with large surface area as this one are commonly found in lightwave communications receivers (FSO) and photoelectric smoke detectors.

If you are using the classic parallel pic programmer using 7406 or 7407 buffer, you might have noticed that this PIC programmer design is a hit and miss device. Most of the time it would program the 16F84 devices but it could give you mixed results when you are programming the 16F877’s and 18F4220’s. If you run EPICWIN with this programmer under
PCs with more than 1 Ghz of cpu speed, you are going to encounter all sorts of error like “code verify error”, “code programming error”, etc.. But if you run it on machines with CPUs running at 800 Mhz or lower, the programmer seems to work fine.

This is a homemade DS89C420  programmer that was built by Glenjoy ( global moderator of electronicslab philipppines forum ). The programmer uses the MAX233
RS232 interface to eliminate those external capacitors required by MAX232. Although a bit
expensive, it is advisable to use zero insertion force sockets on the
programmer to maximize the life of the IC pins. For schematics and pcb layout, check out this link http://www.electronicslab.ph/forum/index.php?topic=84.0

If you were unable to order OPT101 from Texas Instruments sampling program
,you will have no choice but to build your own photo-ic. It is basically a photodiode which operates in photovoltaic mode or zero-bias condition. In this mode, the photodiode generates a small voltage
just like a solar cell. Current then flows from the photodiode to the
feedback resistor producing a voltage drop. This voltage drop is then amplified by
the operational amplifier.  The best locally available photodiode for the job is BPW34 (Visible light) or BPW34F (Infrared). You can also use ordinary LEDs as photodiodes but expect lower sensitivity figures.