Long time, No Say ... ?

Its another long time since I posted any thing.

First things first. A Belated Happy New Year !

And, here at college, We'd wonderful developments.

We had a technical fest called Excel which was conducted on Feb. 2,3,4. The festival was wonderful and I enjoyed it thoroughly. But, I think that such a grand fest would be incomplete without a grand (and I mean really grand) report on Excel 2005. Its a long report. So here goes...

The fest was really good. We had a jolly time together. We met lot of seniors with good faces and characters(The ones we used to meet are always the gangsters, the ragging parties !!).Now I'm truly convinced that there are brilliant students here. We were all friendly. But of course there was small amount of ragging. "Chorichil" as we would like it to call !! For some the "Chorichil" was very distracting and they began to curse the seniors. Some of the juniors even began to shout at them("Kalippu".Hope you know the term ! Sort of "Jada").



Eventhough there was kalippikkal, I enjoyed the whole new experience. I really felt what college life was to be in the coming years! It was requested by the principal to do some projects for Excel and exhibit them in stalls for classes. We (E2A - Electronis and Comm. 2nd SEM A batch)were the class with the most number of working products. Actually only 2 of our projects stopped working. One was because of a faulty transistor and the other, well we never found out why the other never worked !



The class was divided into teams of 5 and we choose "Security Systems" as a general theme for our projects. My team created a shadow alarm which detects shadows. The circuit was obtained from a popular Electronics Magazine - Electronics For You(http://www.electronicsforu.com). It mainly consists a Light sensitive transistor L14F1 which conducts when light falls on it. It was connected to the operational amplifier IC A741. The output of IC was connected to a Timer IC(555) functioning as a monostable vibrator with a time delay of 51 seconds between the states. The IC555 in unstable state activates an alarm circuit consisting of a sound generating IC for producing a police siren sound. The monostable was designed for negative triggering, so will be triggered only when a shadow falls on the L14F1, thus giving a low input to ICA741. Only the ambient light isneeded for the functioning of transistor. We also had a logarithmically varying Resistor to produce a constant output from L14F1 depending on conditions of light.



The circuit was really great. Our detailed explanation of the circuit and the way it was presented brought us well wishes from those who came to see the exhibit. Another team of our class had designed a computer program in VB for centralised control of all our projects. The computer told the user which circuits were activated, and it also wrote a log of times and duration for which it was activated(You know why I needed VS2005 badly ! I began studying VB!). It had also provision to give input for the circuit connected to the computer(In our case it was a battery). Ours was the only circuit to be connected to the computer as all other projects had either varying outputs or outputs > 2V(Nobody had the nerve to use resistors!!)



The other circuits exhibited were voltage regulator, ultrasonic wave controlled locking system, fire alarm, metal detector, electric watchdog, electronic keypad lock, laser security. The ultrasonic wave controlled locking system failed due to a bad transistor, but the model was impressive. A remote switch activated or deactivated an electromagnet attached to the sides of a door. It attracted and repelled a metal rod passing through a grrove, thus bolting and unlocking the door. The concept was simple and elegant, but unfortunately, it did not work. The electronic watchdog was almost like ours. It had an IR sender and receiver unit, and they were aligned. If some one cut the beam, the alarm would sound. It too didn't because of reasons unknown ! The electronic locking system asked the user to enter a series of correct keypresses on a keypad to lock and unlock(They had a red LED for lock and a green one for unlock). The laser security system was almost the sam as ours. The difference being the fact that they used LDR insted of the photo transistor.



In addition to this there were also lot of contests, talks and games. There was gaming contests on Counter Strike and Need for Speed : Underground. I watched it for a bit. The inagrual ceremony didn't come upto my expectations. It was poor. Then there was along and boring class on Data Mining, something I even hadn't heard about. I quickly came up with an excuse to sneak out of there. I left the college at about noon.(about 2.45). There was also a talk by the Indian Navy, but I missed it.



On Feb. 2 and 3 there were talks in Renaissance, a 5 star hotel at Cochin by CEOs of famous companies. Aptly titled "Technoprenuer", the registration fee was Rs. 200. I avoided it as Enterprenuership was not really my field. There was also a guiness world record on Feb 2. One person tried to remember the digits of PI. But it failed.



The second day was really a field day for me. My class had only 2 exhibits that day. The rest of the students were absent because of fear of ragging. So when I went to college, only another team with their electronic locking system was present. Also, only 3(including me) went to the college from our hostel. The rest of them went for cinema. We put the exhibits for some time then withdrew, seeing that no one was coming. The day had two interesting activities that was really exciting for me. The first was a talk on Avionics by a person from ISRO. The other was the product design contest. Avionics class was really interesting. They concentrated mainly on satellite communications and different kinds of wireless technologies like CDMA.



The hardware design contest was really inspiring. The contest was inter college (as were all other contests and games and talks).The participants were given two objects to design. They can choose one from them and develop into a product. They should present the product with techninical specs and marketing strategies. The questions were to :

1. Design a smart pen which would write on any surface and transfer the data to a PC

2. Design an automatic Ad-Muter for television.



It was great to see the teams using totally unconventional strategies. The judges were ruthless. They began asking questions which exposed their many follies and drawbacks. We had a great time.



We also had a workshop on hacking(ethical) the same day by Kalyan Varma Alluri. I couldn't attend it as the waiting list really sored high. I'm still learning what he taught the students who attended from them. They said that they'd a wonderful day.



There were also other contests the same day. I skipped some of them and some weren't interesting to me.



The third and final day dawned on Feb 3. It saw the game "Treasure hunt" which was the highlight of the day. As usual I went to college, but returned after a short while. The college was short of volunteers and so all firs years were turned into volunteers. I escaped ! So it was mobile phone that helped me in participating in the contest. A friend of mine from CUSAT who is staying at the same place was there. He began helping a group of seniors who know us intimately(well, u know how, c'mon guess it !). Treasure is all about solving clues and going up and up in the questions. There are 16 questions and the first five teams to complete the 16 rounds win. So this friend, began phoning me and Manu(another inmate) to solve the clues. Some were logical reasoning type questions, some were vocabulary, some were funny, and some mathematical. The questions were all fun. We had a great time.