Monday, November 8, 2010

Demo to Dr. Kalam at IGNITE 2010, IIMA

IGNITE 2010 was an even organized by the NIF(National Innovation Foundation) at IIMA on 8th Nov. The event was basically meant to encourage young innovators and to distribute awards to the innovators of some selected ideas. Dr. Abdul Kalam (ex President of India) was the chief guest. Me and my team consisting of two other members implemented a system, which we call as a Blind Men Navigation System. We got a chance to demonstrate our project to Dr. Abdul Kalam, when he came to IGNITE. We guided him from the entrance to the area where some other projects were exhibited. Also got a chance to talk to Dr. Kalam and it feels really amazing.

I'll give the more details about the projects later on.
Here are some pics of me and my friends with Dr. Kalam







Saturday, November 6, 2010

Make your mobile phones Touch Screen!!


Want to have a mobile with touchscreen? But do you find it too expensive and not fitting your budget? Are you restricted in the use of internet and apps because you don't have touchscreen phones?

O yes, I am and for all those people having the same problem, Engineers in Cambridge may just have the answer to your woes - and you do not even need to splash out on a new mobile. The engineers at the Cambridge University have developed a software which can tell exactly where you tap on a screen simply by listening to the sound it makes.
A purely software option that just measures the sound signals through the normal microphone of the telephone, and characterizes where you might have been tapping on the screen to replicate the performance of a normal touchscreen phone.
Because the invention doesn't involve any hardware upgradation of the phone, it would simply be a matter of finding the relevant application on the internet, paying for it and downloading it onto your phone.
The technology is so effective at monitoring sounds that it can pin point the "tap" to within one square centimetre, and that it is responsive enough that most users will not even realise the difference between this approach and a conventional touchscreen handset.
The screen resolution is not as good as one will get on an iPhone or new touchscreen phones, but one can certainly navigate complex menu structures on the phone in a similar way to an iPhone.

I am just waiting to find a similar application for my mobile and have an experience of touch screen.

Thursday, November 4, 2010

eUnagram

Recently, in September, we were given a project in the course - Embedded Hardware Design. We were required to make any real application on the ATMega 16 or ATMega 32 microcontroller. We decided to make an electronic anagram solver. It has a mobile like keypad, which can be used by the user to give jumbled words to the processor. The processor would look for the unjumbled word in a hardcoded hashed dictionary. On finding  a match, the controller would show the output on the lcd screen. The user can also the see the alphabets on the lcd screen, just like a mobile. Right now there are only alphabets, space and backspace keys on the keypad. We haven't yet implemented keys for numbers and special characters. We have named the device eUnagram (Un + anagram).

You can find the code on the following link
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5806664/eUnagram/main.c

For the using the LCD, I have used the LCD library by Peter Fleury. You can find the library on the following link
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5806664/eUnagram/lcd.c
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5806664/eUnagram/lcd.h

I have also posted the code on AVRFreaks.

The code is working properly, though I think I can still optimize it. 
Comments and Suggestions are welcomed! 

Monday, March 29, 2010

Art of Living Satsang was pointless

Today I attended a Satsang organized by Art of Living. I wasn't at all intending to go, but one of my seniors forced me to attend it. I thought okay they may give some talk about how to live the life without any tensions....but to my surprise the people started singing prayers and bhajans for 45 min!!!......i thought Art of Living was not at all about religion and m still trying to figure out the relevance of singing prayers to lead a happy and a tension free life....and yes the most stupid part about it was that they made us all dance at the end of the session......basically it was a totally pointless session.....all the things we did made no sense to me...dont know what to expect in the coming sessions....

Thursday, March 18, 2010

Genies out of Amps

Just completed my electronics creative assignment....we had to make something creative to explain some concepts of making a high gain amplifier...Initially we were going to make some flash animation but found that it was too difficult to implement what we wanted...so we decided to make a poem and best thing was that we completed the poem in just one and a half hour...The poem's called "Genies out of Amps"

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Genies out of Amps
                               -Poojan Shah, Pavas Kant, Naman Mishra


Getting a gain.. an easy task
Getting one high enough... a mindless chore..
To find values such we have the task,
pumping our voltage to a 1000 times or more,

The transistor poses many strains,
upon our minds and on our boards,
cutting off in between those waves we sought to change

Sometimes above or down below,
we could not get the volts to go too high or low.
For 0.2 volts min. across CE ends it says, I’ll give you a proper gain
Fighting it we try to make, a proper bar-gain.
we say we’ll give thou ends thy need, biases as thy please,

we sought to make a gain on waves,
 we forgot they were not our loyal mate,
they varied with time confusing our friend, forcing it to saturate...
we brought in DC our trusted mate
 to make life for our friend a piece of cake...
we said to him forget those waves
 we'll give you something which negates those strains.
On high values we pasted the waves
 smoothing their troughs way over our constraints.

Our friend now says I’ll give you what I can but to my own limits I can take,
I won't give you what you seek but you can use another me for your sake.

We try to get another friend, a pal who'll make us the gain we seek,
but bringing in another friend, strained our 1st one's peak.

Loading it brought down its gain that was now our main pain...
We now brought in one with a unit gain into the two man chain...
This solved our worries to an extent great,
the new one's Rin was the secret,

We now had our inputs sorted, just needed to get our output on the dotted...
We had some gain from the first and we sought to make matters worse,
we wanted more to please our needs, forcing another to meet our greed...
We connected another friend onto the board, cluttering it even more,
we now had our heart’s desires, we had our waves as sapphires....

 The magic of Amps had made genies come out of lamps,
granting us what we desire we now had our waves as sapphires.

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Please post your comments on the poem.... 

Me on DA-IICT website

Chalo at last i have my photo on the DA-IICT website www.daiict.ac.in .Everytime some press people or the photographer would take my picture but it never occured on the website or in any newspaper, but now atlast it is there on the website. But I dont know why do I look so angry??

My first talk

I gave my first talk of my life on New Trends in Wireless Protocols - WiMax, LTE and DASH-7 in TechTalks, an initiative by DA-IICT IEEE Student Branch. There were some 25 people and as soon as I was give the mike I started sweating. It wasn't one of the best talks but anyways I managed to talk about whatever I wanted to and I very happy for that. At least now I have some confidence that I can speak in public and would definitely like to get another such opportunity.