Welcome
to Mohit Bhoite's homepage !
moved to a new domain: www.bhoite.com
13
October 2008
Artbots: These
robots were built for Shilpa
Gupta, an independent artist based here in Mumbai. The idea
was to have a set of robots follow a line pattern on the floor
and chant out a pre-recorded message.
The
robots were showcased at Shilpa’s exhibitions in Bodhi,
Berlin (June 2008) and more recently at Bodhi
Space, Mumbai (it’s on display till Oct 2008 end; do catch
a glimpse if you can!)
click
on the images to know more...
28
September 2008
I
recently completed a cycling expedition in Leh-Ladhak through
the YHAI camp. But wait, this post is not about the expedition. You can
find the Flickr set here.
I
hadn’t cycled for years and wanted to cycle again. But
suddenly heading for a high altitude (11500 feet) 240Km+ long
adventure could have proved disastrous. The expedition was a
perfect opportunity to invest in a new cycle and reignite the
lost passion. So a month prior to the trip, I bought myself
a Suncross mountain bike and began practicing. It soon occurred
to me that a speedo/odometer could prove very handy. I simply
couldn’t resist the temptation of building one myself
than to invest in an off-the-shelf solution. But the month kept
me busy in other things and the speedo project could never see
the light of day.
read
the rest of the post...
26
August 2008
A day at TRI; rare glimpse inside TRI a.k.a. ThinkLabs.
Click on the images below to access the Flickr
set.
12
June 2008
New look. I'm hoping to add a few new sections and update
the rest in the coming weeks. So stay tuned and thank you for
visiting!
08
November 2007
Theres a new kid on the block this Diwali. He is fast,
reliable and kinda cute.
I’ve been using the homebuilt Multi-PIC programmer for almost 4 years now. It has served me well through
all those years. But recently when I tried to venture into the
16 bit domain, it failed me. And ofcourse, how can I deny the
fact that it is rs232 based and requires some crazy voltages
for operation. After looking out for some easy diy usb based
programmers and reading suggestions on a local forum, I concluded
that buying the PICkit 2 would be a sensible choice.
If you are into PIC development, I highly recommend investing
in the Microchip's USB based programmer. PICkit
2 supports most of the PIC families including the 16 bit
dsPIC series. An ideal geeky gift this Diwali. ^_^
29
August 2007
Jugnoo and Jassi are now online...
click
here to know more about them...
18
August 2007
Basanti and Micromouse can now be seen in action. Even though these videos are more
than a year old, I decided to upload them anyway...
|
|
| The above video dates back to Jan 2006. Its one of
the very early maze tests for the micromouse. The
maze was built out of thermocol sheets. |
This
was taken somewhere in Feb 2006. I was preparing Basanti for a local line following robotics competition. |
15
August 2007
Heres a long overdue update on the BEAM bots built earlier
this year; "The Photovore
Family"
Happy
Indian Independence Day !!
13
August 2007
Apart from designing and building robots, I do a lot
of SketchUping at the office. It’s been just over a year since I discovered
it. Be it writing assembly guides for our robot kits or while
designing TRI's booths at technical festivals; it comes in real
handy. I’m not a CAD expert myself, but with this, the
results are quite satisfying. Here are a few screenshots:
click
here to see more.
1
July 2007
It was time
to say farewell to Basanti, Gulabo and most of the BEAM bots built a
few years ago. The harsh coastal air of Mumbai had turned most
of these naked pieces of machinery into oxidized junk. I had
been hoarding them for obvious sentimental values but I let
it all go today. I also threw away a lot of electronic circuit
boards taken out from old telephones, fax machines, computers
and radios. I was planning to scavenge some components out of
them but soon realized that it just wasn’t worth the effort.
The idea of getting rid of this toxic e-waste seemed more logical.
And as a bonus, it created some more breathing space in my bedroom.
But I do plan to fill it up with some new ‘naked pieces
of machinery’ soon. Did I just hear myself choke?
On
the other hand, I finally took the badly needed break from my
office. The monsoons are here and the timing couldn’t
have been any better. I need to get a few important things figured
out in the meantime and take my GRE.
My rebellion attitude during the college years has come to haunt
me now. I never really gave priority to scoring high in exams;
passing was just about enough for me. I devoted most of the
time to my hobby of building robots. The college provided me
with ample of time to pursue this fantasy. My acads took a real
beating during this time. Why would I want to score high? To
stand first in the class? Na…To get a good job? Na…I was never concerned about getting a job. To better my prospects of getting into a good graduate school? Bull’s-eye! And that’s when I realized
I had screwed up. I did manage to score good in my final semester
but probably that was a bit too late. I don’t regret any
of this at all. But what I do regret is the fact that during
this period I also managed to learn 'the fine art of procrastination'.
And this has come to haunt me now. Studying has never
been so difficult.
After
watching the rerun of the Rocky series recently, I’m determined to stay focused; eye
of the tiger. Now only if that was as easy as watching the
movie.
29
January 2007
What happens when you are putting in 15hrs at work,
building dozens of robots, conducting workshops and doing backbreaking
commuting? Well, you are left with an unupdated homepage! So
here's a belated happy new year !
Yesterday, IIT
Bombay's 10th Techfest was concluded. TRI had setup a booth at the R&D exhibition and was really well
received. A part of my assignment was to design and build a
dozen of BEAM robots for the display. Even though I had only
a few weeks in hand, I'm quite satisfied with the end result.
Pics
of all the robots will be put up soon.
20
October 2006
Happy Deepavali to all of you !!
An update after two whole months, phew ! Most of
my time and energy now goes into updating and maintaining the Resources section at TRI's website. I'll be putting up some interesting
articles in the coming months over there. Meanwhile its vacation
time !!
12
August 2006
TRI recently conducted an autonomous level robotics workshop, aka
iTRIx, at Anand, Gujrat. Venue was kindly provided by GCET.
We all had an amazing time there. The photos have been uploaded
on Flickr, click
here to visit the album. The workshop covered all the basics
of autonomous robotics while using SUMO robots as the central
theme. Visit
here to know more about this workshop.
Oh,
and by the way, I officially joined TRI
Technologies recently. Its a great team to work with. Imagine
somebody paying you to build robots! How cool is that?
16
July 2006
While
the rains flood, blasts rock and tension mounts here in Mumbai,
I’m fortunate enough to wake up to a new day, alive and
in one piece.
It has been a long time since I last built any robots.
A recent assignment at TRI
Technologies made it possible for me to get back to my first
love, BEAM. Nathulal and Bhola crawled
and wiggled their way into the new world a few weeks ago. Nathulal
is a walker while Bhola is a phototrophic head. Both are based
on the bicore principle.
Click here to have a look at my latest
beam bots.
20
June 2006
India’s first Micromouse workshop, aka MouseTRIx,
began yesterday at the IIT Mumbai campus. It’s a week
long workshop and I was lucky enough to get an opportunity to
attend it. It was organised by a cool new startup TRI.
The day two began with the final assembly of the
chassis and mounting of the controller board. The kit is
as professional as it could get. Laser-cut chassis, machined
wheels, super-cool Atmega16 controller board and a lecture delivered
by Ashish
Bhat himself. It couldn’t get any better than this.
I don’t have much time to write now, but
I’ll put up a detailed ‘post-workshop’ analysis
in the coming weekend. click
here to visit the gallery...
14
June 2006
“Pradeep,
they are going to give us a free usb based development
kit for their new microcontroller!”
My friend Pradeep couldn't believe his ears when I broke the
news. I couldn’t believe it either. We were really looking
forward to this workshop conducted by Texas
Instruments (TI) in association with Arrow Electronics here
in Mumbai. And as a topping on the cake, it was conducted at
a five star hotel, Le Meridian, Andheri.
It
was about TI’s MSP430 series of low power 16bit microcontrollers,
targeted mostly at the handheld and battery operated devices.
They are based on a really interesting architecture and achieve
the highest code density in their class. I was impressed. read more...
6
June 2006
Mobots completes 5 years in the cyber-world !! (and I complete
22 years, in the real )
Although the web-address kept changing from time to time, this
site always existed as a mirror. But since the past few months,
it’s my only official homepage. A special thanks
to Dave for not pulling this site down.
All these years have been wonderful.
Thank you to all of you who visited this site in the past. I’m
sure you will keep visiting in the future as well.
16
May 2006
The thrill, glory, excitement, adrenaline rush, late nights,
sore eyes, cuts, bruises, frozen gray matter, growling stomach,
goose bumps, debugging, coding-recoding, learning-relearning,
yelling, shouting...........this is what micromouse does to
you. I experienced it all. It really gets on to you. I know
I sound like a complete fanatic, but that’s just me. read
more...
4
May 2006
I had always thought of using a CAD tool for sketching
robot designs. I tried using a variety of tools like Autocad,
3Dmax, etc. but none of them were easy to use and took an awful
lot of patience. So I resorted back to sketching by hands, until
now.
A couple of days back, I stumbled across a beautiful
software, SketchUp,
from Google.
I simply haven’t stopped CADing since then! It’s
like building all those dream robots in a matter of minutes
(or hours). All of my fantasy designs can now come true, virtually
that is.
Heres my humble beginning…
Oh
boy, am I having fun or what!
27
April 2006
Added a guestbook to this site. I am new to PHP
scripting, so had to borrow it from PHP
JunkYard, written by Klemen Strin. It will be fully functional
by the time I post this update. Please feel free to post your
comments or suggestions. Follow the link at top right corner
or simply click here.
17
April 2006
Spinning led displays are a joy to
watch. I read numerous articles on the web describing their
construction in detail and was planning to build one myself.
But yesterday, I came across a chinese made spinning display
at a local street market. They were being sold at dirt cheap
rates of Rs.30 (bargained it down from 50). The moment I saw
it, I knew I could hack it and add some patterns of my own. read more...
10
April 2006
The workshop on line following robots was a great
success.Ten kits were successfully assembled and an equal number
of robots were built. My friend Swapnil, captured the moments
on his phone-camera. Read more...
28
March 2006
I designed a PCB for a robotics workshop held in our college
recently. We needed 20 PCBs in all, so we decided to get them
fabricated at a local pcb fabricator in the suburbs. I jumped
on the opportunity to capture the whole pcb fabrication process
on camera.
The
fabricator's setup was typical by Indian standards. It looked
chaotic at first sight, but.......read
more....
15
March 2006:
Happy HOLI to all of you! Uploaded the links page.
27
Feb 2006:
I recently built an advanced line following robot, "Basanti",
for a local robotics competion. I named it after being inspired
from the lovely movie "Rang de Basanti". Basanti was
working just fine on the day of the practice but on the day
of the finals, her behaviour turned erratic. I simply could'nt
find out the reason. Maybe she got scared of the judges or something.
But she ended up getting a consolation prize. Enough to cover
my travelling expences and buy me a ticket to the movie "Rang
de Basanti" ;-) You can have a look at Basanti over here.
7
Feb 2006:
Added the IIT Techfest 2006 gallery
page. More details coming soon...
26
Jan 2006:
I have finally managed to update this website after a really
long spell. Some of the pages are yet to be put up but I'll
do that asap. A lot of new pages are on the way.
A special thanks to Solarbotics
for this free real estate
