In the 2nd semester of my (indefinitely* long) college lyf, I had a project-based course: Electronics Workshop 1, thanks to the new curriculum. There are no exams for this course (jealous??) and evaluation is solely based on the project we do. It is a do or die course. Either you do the project well (from faculty point of view) or be prepared to repeat the course. Pretty heavy uh??
A team consists of two members. Me and my partner (Abhishek Bhatia), after a few days of discussions and debates, settled on an idea - a waking up robot. We called it 'Clockie' ( google it & u will find how we got that name). Actually it is now commercially available but not like we made it.
Clockie does the right thing if you think it is right. But, i fear, our planet is filled with people who dont think straight. Such people may find out pet bot an irritant. God, have mercy on them.
Now, coming to his working. In the morning, we all are too lazy to get out of bed. Though we never fail to set the alarm at night, we never succeed in preventing ourselves from turning it off and going back to our nice old dream. I am not saying this is bad. But the problem is that we do it with our subconscious mind. This may have serious repurcussions if you have something really important to do (man this is recession time!!). Clockie puts an end to all this 'indiscipline'. When the alarm mounted on clockie rings and you try to switch it off, well it remains an unsuccessful trial. Clockie wont allow you to switch it off unless and until you get out of your bed and grab it along the sides and switch it off. By this time your mind will be awake and thus, clockie succeeds in his task. One more thing. Clockie doesnt fall off the table. In short, he will start working when you try to switch off the alarm, keep going around the table without falling off the edge, and stop working after a predetermined time period.
We came up with the initial design in about a week (though we worked less than 3 nights)[Dude you know college life. Never do something today that you can do tmrow!!]. But that had serious flaws. Thus about a week passed (now you know. 2-3 nights) when we finally settled on a design that was nearly flawless. Then we stepped from the world of theories into the long-awaited practical world. Man, it is fun out there. Blowing up capacitors, blasting off ICs, burning potentiometers, finding something fishy about the circuit when you get a burnt smell.....Above all it is the group spirit that kept us going. We knew we would be screwed if the project doesnt turn out well. Yet we were in no hurry (you are not alone and you forget fears and tensions).
Slowly days turned into weeks and the deadline came nearer and nearer. Clockie began giving us days of agony. Sometimes its behaviour could have made a priest an atheist. We started working late into nights. Some days, we skipped our lunch and remained in our lab trying to debug the (then) damn thing. If we fail to debug, we would wire the entire circuit again (what nerves we have!!). We even thought of shifting our sleep to lab (sarcastically). Since our sensors were light-based, our enemy no.1 was the sun. We used to see clockie work merrily at night. Happily we used to go to our beds. We would come back in the morning to find the (then) dumb thing falling off the edge or work in some stupid manner . We became atheists.
Eventually due to some ingenious ideas and methods, we could reduce the effect of environment on our clockie (became our pet again). On the day of demonstration, it worked perfectly well. It was an open-house and the whole institution was invited to watch the demo. The audience was impressed.The viva went smoothly. Clockie was loved by all.
Thus came the happy ending of a month-long journey. We were told either to disintegrate our clockie and return the components or pay for the components and keep clockie. You know what we did. Now he must be dwelling peacefully in a showcase of a home in Rajasthan (my partner is from there). Let him live peacefully forever...
*will come to it later
*will come to it later
