C.P. Ravikumar
Texas Instruments
19-Dec, 2013. 1045 Hrs. When my flight touched ground at Terminal 3 of the International Airport at New Delhi on time, I sighed with a sense of relief. Just the previous day, there were reports of the infamous Delhi fog delaying flights, leaving hundreds of passengers stranded. I briskly walked out of the terminal and caught a Taxi towards Rohini. My destination was the campus of Delhi Technological University. It took me about two hours in the Delhi traffic to finally arrive at the campus. I was greeted warmly by Prof. Rajiv Kapoor, Head of the Department of Electronics and Communication at DTU.
I had two reasons for my visit to DTU.
A Solar Car!
Just a day before my visit to DTU, I had a chance to listen to Mr Chetan Maini, Founder and CEO of Mahendra REVA, about the future of mobility in India. As an invited speaker at the TI India Technical Conference - 2013, he spoke about the hybrid electric vehicles that are being designed and deployed by his company. These vehicles need to have five "C"s according to Mr Maini - "clean," "connected," "convenient," "clever," and "cost-effective." If you are good at C programming, you will definitely be good at building solar cars! During the course of Q&A, Mr. Maini revealed that he had participated in a solar car race in 1990 as a student. (You can read more about this here.) "What a coincidence," I thought. "I am going to meet a team that is planning the exact same thing in 2014!"
Prof. P.B. Sharma, Vice Chancellor of DTU, hands over the components to student members Pulkit and Rohit of the Solar Car team
A team of students from DTU is planning to take part in the North American Solar Challenge - 2014. Their car is called "Helios." You can read more about the DTU solar car projects at this website. My first mission in my visit to DTU was to ensure that the components sought by the student team for the telemetry subsystem of Helios reaches them. Upon my request, Prof. P.B. Sharma, the Vice Chancellor of DTU, handed over the components to two representatives of the Helios team. On behalf of Texas Instruments, I conveyed my best wishes to the team for great success in their project. Prof. Sharma offered many words of advice to the students. Two of them stayed with me. The first one was to make their design modular and build on top of an existing successful project, rather than start from scratch. The second was to keep the road conditions and needs of the region (India) when designing their project. The second point resonated with the words I had heard from Mr. Chetan Maini - "We have the technology today to make a solar car that needs no charging for 300 kilometers, but we ought to evaluate the needs of the Indian users. The chances are, due to traffic conditions, most people will not travel for more than a 100 km at a stretch!" I wish to pass on the points made by Prof. Sharma and Mr. Maini as words of advice for the participants of Texas Instruments Innovation Challenge.
Beaglebone Black Workshop!
About 50 students took part in the workshop on Beaglebone Black at DTU (Dec 18-19, 2013)
Prof. Rajiv Kapoor organized a two-day workshop on Beaglebone in the Department of Electronics and Communication at DTU during Dec 18-19, 2013. The second mission I had to accomplish was to address the student participants of this workshop. Asif Mohammed of Cranes Software has been busy training the participants and demonstrating various applications of the Beaglebone Black, including the famous "moustache" demo. What struck me was the enthusiasm of the students for learning. They did very well in the short quiz I ran through on the topic of Beaglebone Black. A number of students were in their second year of undergraduate program and it was good to know that they felt the Black was easy to use. I have already blogged about Black and how it can be used in the early stage of Engineering curriculum to build interest among students in the area of embedded system design.
Interestingly, Beaglebone Black and some associated capes are among the components that Team Helios wishes to use in the telemetry system of their Solar Car project.