Project Ideas Considered

1. Tangible Distributed Systems Simulator ✅ (selected)

Physical blocks that represent compute nodes, databases, load balancers etc. and can be arranged to achieve system design patterns.

2. Water Heater Usage Tracker

My brothers share and apartment and have an ancient water heater that they forget to turn off and fight over who left it on. This simply detects the light from the heater in the boiler room when it’s on, and beeps and mechanically switches it off after a fixed period.

3. Temperature Controller for Perpetual Stew (aka forever soup)

Medieval inns sometimes had a pot into which foodstuffs are placed and cooked, continuously and the pot is never or rarely emptied. The stew is a temperature critical process and needs to kept at the same temperature for as long as possible, requiring the system to be highly distributed and fault-tolerant.

4. Miniature Data Center Rack

A tabletop-scale server rack replica with 4-6 removable “blade servers,” each being a real programmable compute node with displays and LEDs. They communicate over CAN bus, another embedded module acts as the management server hosting a web dashboard, and the whole system demonstrates distributed control patterns you can physically see and interact with.