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
