How A Copy Of Electronics For You Magazine And A Postcard Changed My Life.

 In the summer of 1985, I had completed my first year of B.Sc.(Electronics) course at ARSD College, University of Delhi. We were the first batch of this course which was started at four colleges of the Delhi University (ARSD College, Sri Venkateswara College, Rajdhani College and Ramjas College). Being the first batch, no one had any clue about the laboratory experiments and so the first year was boring and totally uninspiring. No wonder, I spent the summer of 1985 doing odd jobs such as working for a market research company and at another time, selling electronics tools to electronics product companies across Delhi but mostly in the Okhla Industrial area. 

Sometime in July 1985, before the next session started, I was browsing books on a sunday afternoon at the famous Daryaganj Sunday Book bazar and I came across a recent issue of Electronics for You (EFY). I clearly remember the contents of the article by L. Jagadhiswar Rao who had a transcript of a something called 'Ham Radio' conversation between an Indian Ham stationed in Antarctica and another in Chandigarh. I did not know what Ham Radio was and I couldn't make much sense of the transcript. This chance reading turned out to be great serendipity. 

  I have not been able to locate that particular article but a similar article by the same author published around the same time frame looks like the following.

As you can see, the conversation contains far too many codes for a normal person to understand. In that particular article, the author urged the readers to look for his articles in previous issues of EFY to know more about the hobby and clubs across India that promoted Ham Radio. I was fortunate that my college had back issues of EFY and I browsed through all of them and found an article by the same author with details of Ham Radio and the said addresses of Ham Radio clubs in India.

On the second page, I found a club listed for Delhi but with a postbox address. I wrote them a postcard evincing my interest in meeting them and knowing more about the hobby. After a few months, I received a printed 'inland letter' signed by one Anand Chaturvedi who informed me about the location of the club (it was located at the erstwhile Appu Ghar at Pragati Maidan in Delhi) and I was welcome to visit them on a weekend as that was the time they all met.

In early October, I paid them a visit and one of the volunteers showed me their club and the radio station. He even turned on the HF transceiver and let me hear the same cryptic, coded conversation except in real time. I came to know that the club was presided over by one Dr. Ahutosh Singh (VU2IF) and it turned out that he was the same gentleman about whom I had read about in the 1985 issue of EFY on Ham Radio by Jagadhiswar Rao! I though this was too much of a coincidence and maybe there was a larger motive and purpose behind this. 

I became a regular member of this club - Amateur Radio Association and met Dr. Ashutosh Singh soon. He turned out to be a great mentor. Although a PhD from IIT Delhi in condensed matter physics, Dr. Ashutosh Singh was interested in building scientific instrumentation. Dr. Ashutosh Singh is one of those rare breed of people who work silently without seeking public approval of their work nor seek stardom through political maneuvering. Apart from mentoring 100s of people like me, he was a (non-governmental) member of the 2nd and 3rd Indian expedition to Antarctica.

I was impressed with all the developmental activities going on at the club (they were building HF and VHF transceivers). Dr. Singh induced me to build a power supply for future Ham Radio projects and I went from a simple transformer + rectifier + filter power supply to one with electronic regulation and fold back current limiting feature. I soon got 5-6 classmates involved in Ham Radio. We all learnt Morse Code (and practiced communicating in Morse in the classroom by tapping on the desk) and appeared for the Amateur Station Operators' License exam conducted by the Wireless Planning and Coordination wing of the Ministry of Communications and got the license in about 1-1/2 years. 

More than Ham Radio itself, I got hooked onto electronics and that love and fascination for building circuits has lasted a lifetime and have had a very enjoyable and successful career around electronics. I have an epiphany that the chance reading of an EFY article and sending a 15 paisa postcard is akin to what people say - when you want something, the entire universe conspires in helping you to get it. 

Today I visited EFY offices at Okhla Industrial Area to take pictures of old EFY issues that I have shared here in this blog and I thank Rahul Chopra, the CEO of the Electronics for You group in facilitating the visit.

Socially Useful Productive Work. A Talking Weighing Scale for the Visually Impaired!

 Making something which is socially useful is always desirable. In my ecosystem, I don't care if I can have a car navigate the roads autonomously, using machine learning. What I care about is a weighing scale that can speak out the weight using a suitable hardware and software. Here is a project we did for helping the visually impaired students pursue science in a meaningful way. Hopefully, it will be adopted by NCERT and scaled for widespread use.

 

Electronics Design Workshop - A Hands-on Course

 This semester (January to May 2022), I am teaching a course titled 'Electronics Design Workshop' to 4th semester students of ECE at NSUT. Incidentally, I had designed the syllabus for this course 2 years ago. Although it was offered for the first time last year, I did not have an opportunity to teach it. Now, I do.

The weekly schedule consists of 2 hours of lectures and 4 hours of laboratory session. Although, while the online classes are on, we do not have the luxury of face to face laboratory experience. 

Here is the syllabus:

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Learning Objectives:

1. To be able to visualize a system/product in terms of hardware and software building blocks using a project based learning approach.
2. Learn useful mechanical and electronic fabrication processes.
3. Learn necessary skills to build useful and standalone system/project with enclosures
4. Learn necessary skills to create print and electronic documentation for the system/project
5. Build, test and document a useful power supply before the mid term.
6. Build, test and document a useful project/system.
7. Learn various debugging tools and techniques.

Unit 1: Electronic component familiarization, Understanding electronic system design flow - visualization of system requirements, time planning using Gantt chart, schematic design and PCB layout, circuit fabrication, soldering and testing, heat sink and cooling for critical components, system wiring, building system enclosure, system testing and debugging, documentation. Documentation using Google docs, Overleaf. Documentation from firmware - Doxygen. Version control tools for documentation as well as firmware release management - GIT and GitHub. Familiarization and use of basic measurement instruments - DSO including various triggering modes, 1X and 10X probes, DMM (including CAT I, CAT II, CAT III, and CAT IV type of DMMs), LCR bridge, Signal and function generator. Logic analyzer or MSO. Bench power supply (with 4-wire output)

 Unit 2: Circuit prototyping using (a) breadboard, (b) Zero PCB (c) ‘Manhattan’ style and (d) custom PCB. Schematic design and PCB layout using EagleCAD. Gerber creation and 3D visualization for fitting. Single, double and multilayer PCBs. Single and double sided PCB prototype fabrication in the lab. Soldering using soldering iron/station. Soldering using a temperature controlled reflow oven. Automated circuit assembly and soldering using pick and place machines.

Unit 3: Electronic circuit building blocks including common sensors.  Arduino programming and use. Getting acquainted with the Arduino IDE and Basic Sketch structure. Digital Input and output. Measuring time and events. PWM. Serial communication. Analog input. Interrupts programming. 

Unit 4: Power sources and power supply regulator design. Linear and switching power supply. Transformerless power supply. Zener regulator, op-amp based regulator. 723 IC regulator. 3-terminal IC regulators. LDO and micropower regulators. Buck, Boost and Buck-boost switching regulators. Short circuit and over-voltage protection. Wireless power supply. USB-PD. Battery types and characteristics. Battery charging for lead-acid and lithium type batteries. 

Unit 5: Mechanical fabrication processes - 3-axis CNC, 3D printing, mini lathe, drilling, Laser cutting, Laser engraving etc.. 3D printing technology - FDM, SLS and SLA. 3-axis CNC operation. 2D file designing for drilling, cutting,  milling, Laser Cutting and engraving using Flatcam, Inkspace, OpenBSP. 3D file designing using Sketchup, FreeCAD, Prusa Slicer.

 

Suggested Reading:

1. The Art of Electronics. 3rd edition. Paul Horowitz and Winfield Hill. Cambridge University Press. ISBN: 9780521809269 
2. Practical Electronics for Inventors. 4th edition. Paul Sherz and Simon Monk. McGraw Hill. ISBN-13: 978-1259587542 
3. Encyclopedia of Electronic Components (Volume 1, 2 and 3). Charles Platt. Shroff Publishers. ISBN-13: 978-9352131945, 978-9352131952, 978-9352133703
4. Building Scientific Apparatus. 4th edition. John H. Moore, Christopher C. Davis, Michael A. Coplan and Sandra C. Greer. Cambridge University Press. ISBN-13: 978-0521878586
5. Programming Arduino: Getting Started With Sketches. 2nd edition. Simon Monk. McGraw Hill. ISBN-13: 978-1259641633
6. Debugging. David J. Agans. Amacom. ISBN: 0814474578
7. Make Your Own PCBs with EAGLE: From Schematic Designs to Finished Boards. Simon Monk and Duncan Amos. McGraw Hill Education. ISBN-13 : 978-1260019193.
8. Pro GIT. 2nd edition. Scott Chacon and Ben Straub. Apress. ISBN-13 : 978-1484200773

Laboratory Activities:

Basically, build a stand alone mini-project using Arduino (or any other microcontroller of your choice), some sensors, displays etc. The mini project should have its own power supply or battery power source. The mini-project should be properly enclosed in lab designed and fabricated enclosure which could be 3D printed or made using CNC machining. The mini-project would have a mandatory documentation report.

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For majority of students who join ECE these days, it's not their first choice. If they could, they would have liked to join some CS course. However, I want to assure them that (a) it's all very much crowded in the CS stream (b) there is no dearth of programming opportunities in ECE subjects (c) at the end of the day,  a computer program needs real hardware to run, even if it's in the cloud. YOU can be that engineer who will build that piece of hardware! 

What do I expect you to build? Well, there are a kazillion things you could build. Here is a sample example. It's an AVR microcontroller based circuit, with it's very own custom designed and 3D printed enclosure. It works in two modes - in one of the modes, it displays the ambient temperature on the single seven segment display (by serially printing the three digit temperature in degrees Celsius) and in the other mode, it generates a random number between 0 and F. In the first mode, it can also be used to generate Morse code by pressing the switch or attaching and pressing Morse key to the Aux connector. You will hear the sound of the Morse code on the buzzer that you can see towards the top of the gadget, next to the red seven segment display.

The black blob next to the Aux connector is the temperature sensor (LM35). If you don't see any microcontroller, don't be alarmed. It's on the other side of the PCB, it's a SMD component - Tiny44. The power to the system is from a USB charger or USB power bank, you see that blue cable?

I am very excited to start the classes from tomorrow. Although, I wish we would get over with this third wave quickly and back to normal, face to face classes, so that my students can get real hands-on experience of building useful electronic circuits and systems.

A 'Teaching Instrument' - Experimental Element of Education during Lockdown.

How to ensure that experimental work can continue in such lock down conditions too?

Here is a paper written by Prof. K V Sane, with whom I had an opportunity to work with, during 1989-1992. The solution is, what he calls a 'Teaching Instrument'.

You may have already realized how the specifications of several instruments in electronics labs are way above their actually utilization. A 1GSPS/100 MHz DSO commonly found in electronics labs, hardly ever gets used beyond 1 MHz.

Today, the cheapest 3-1/2 digit DMM sells for less than Rs. 100. It is not impossible to imagine a 10MHz BW DSO front end connected to your laptop (for the display) for Rs. 250. Thus, it is quite possible to imagine a 'Lab in a Box' with a set of components etc, all for less than Rs. 1000 that may be quite sufficient for conducting experiments at home during lockdown conditions.

Getting a student to build such a 'teaching instruments' will generate an additional benefit of student involvement, skills in soldering, system design etc, which are currently sorely lacking.

 

Parenting an Industry in Engineering Institutes

This is an old idea I thought strongly about in the past, which is making a comeback, at least in my mind. Perhaps, it is the right time to consider it seriously, however crazy it might appear:

"If a medical college must have a hospital to function, why should it not be mandatory for an engineering college to have an industry on campus? For how long would we keep fooling the country that we are engaged in 'blue sky' research? That 'blue sky' research has no term period. Choose an industry of your choice, whatever is needed and beneficial in your region, choose the scale that you can handle. But for your own sake, choose something."

This idea will also address the concern of many academics who often defend the Indian engineering educational institutes and feel they are the victims. However flawed their defense of the Indian engineering educational institutes maybe, this proposal addresses that also.

Also, if you notice, this idea is making a backdoor entry in many engineering institutes in India already - how would you describe the so called 'Incubation Centres' if not a backdoor entry of industry into educational institutes?

However, as currently implemented, the incubation centres are flawed. The engineering colleges which are hosting such incubation centres, do not have their own skin in the game, they are merely working as landlords. They take government's grant money and use their extra space to rent to start ups. That has to stop. The engineering institutes must take larger ownership of these start ups and groom them as their own. And not just to sell off to an established company but to actually manufacture something.

Assistive Technologies for Visually Impaired Students

Last week, before the lock down kicked in, I had an opportunity to participate in a week long workshop conducted by Department of Education in Science and Mathematics (DESM) at NCERT. The workshop was about putting together requirements and guidelines for creating assistive technologies for the visually impaired students to visualize and enjoy science in general and to pursue science experiments in particular.

Midway during the workshop, I showed all the participants (around 20 teachers from various levels) all our embedded systems projects many of which demonstrate talking sensor ideas.
As a result, I am happy to share that I have been tasked with creating about 12 assistive sensor projects. They deal with sensing liquid, light, touch, heat, weight, color, pressure etc and to convert to sound and/or speech.

It's not only a great honor for me and my cohorts at NSUT, it is also a great responsibility. It is important that the faith that has been reposed in us, should be responsibly discharged.

I am therefore, using this platform to seek summer interns to work on these projects. I am looking for students with good 'Maker' skills together with knowledge about electronic circuit design and fabrication, embedded controllers, embedded programming and circuit and system fabrication. Please e-mail me your CV/resume as a PDF file that lists matching skill-set at: dvgadreatgmaildotcom.

Caveat Emptor: We don't know how this current pandemic will play out and whether we will have any summer vacations at all. So, please keep that in mind.

Posthumous Digital Picture Frame

I read the following on WhatsApp:

जब तक जीवन है ……रोज डी पी बदलिए.

बाद में तो एक ही फोटो में लटके रहना है 😂😂😂

वो भी बच्चों ने लगाई तो !!!😜😜

(While you are alive, change your DP everyday. After you are dead, there will only be a single picture on display and that too if your kids put it up!)

When I think about it, it dawns on me that it is so true! But in this day and age, it need not be like this at all. Here is a possible business idea - A posthumous digital picture frame. You purchase a plan and you start submitting your pictures to this service. Once you die, the people you name in your will, will be delivered a digital picture frame which will have all those pictures you submitted over time and they will be displayed on the picture frame cyclically!

I am very sure this a great idea and may have good demand.