2006
Archives
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.net
for this free real estate
