The IEEE student branch at the University of California, Berkeley, lucked out when Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak went back to his roots. An alumnus of the school, class of 1986, he donated US $1000 to the branch in September. The money came from an online auction at Hotswap.com, a start-up cofounded earlier this year by Ken Elkabany, the chair of the branch. The money came when Wozniak auctioned his 2005 silver Nissan 350Z.

Woz, as he is also known, got involved with the auction site, thanks to a business relationship he had with another of Hotswap’s cofounders, Elkabany says. Woz signed on as an advisor to the start-up, and he proposed auctioning his car to generate publicity for the site’s launch on 8 September.

“We thought donating the profit from the sale to a nonprofit such as the IEEE would be great, and Woz was all for it,” Elkabany explains. They had hoped to raise more money, but the two-week auction period was too short to create enough publicity about the sale, he says. Woz’s asking price for the car was originally around $49 000, the value of the car, but he decided to drop it to $22 000 so more bidders could afford it. The car finally went for $23 000.

The students tried to generate some buzz about the auction by filming a parody of a commercial Woz made for Nissan Motor Co. in the 1980s about another Nissan, the 280Z model.

“The old commercial is notorious for how corny it is,” Elkabany says.

The students’ parody can be seen at http://www.hotswap.com/products/view/13e9b64bad82.

Although the sale didn’t garner as much money as hoped, the donation was applauded. “We received thousands of comments from visitors to the site who were excited to see the donation going to UC Berkeley and, more specifically, to the IEEE,” Elkabany says. “And Steve received applause from countless people.”

“This is going to really improve the working conditions of the [student branch] lab,” Woz wrote on Hotswap’s message board. (The IEEE student branch at UC Berkeley maintains a little EE lab of its own.) The money will be used to buy a surface-mount station, says Elkabany.

The Berkeley student branch is no stranger to attracting funds. It received several grants from the IEEE over the past two years for its Hands on Practical Electronics (HOPE) course, which strives to make engineering appealing to all students by building electronic devices in class—rather than just studying theory. Last year the branch introduced HOPE, geared to freshmen, as part of a program that lets students create and run their own classes. The surface-mount station will help students in the HOPE class build circuit boards.

For more information on the UC Berkeley Hands on Practical Electronics Course (HOPE), check out
http://www.theinstitute.ieee.org/portal/site/tionline/menuitem.130a3558587d56e8fb2275875bac26c8/index.jsp?&pName=institute_level1_article&TheCat=2201&article=tionline/legacy/inst2007/jan07/featurestudents.xml&.

Visit Hotswap at www.hotswap.com.