A year of Making[2014]
Year 2014 Makes
MakerFest
The year of Making started with the first MakerFest, which was also a first exhibition experience for me. It was a great place to be, thanks to Anool, who got the Makerfest team and me in touch, thank you Anool.
Design & Innovation Workshop
Later in January attended the Design and Innovation workshop by MIT Media Labs India initiative. It was a place were I met awesome people like Varun Sanghvi who is top mechanical engineer in my book. Also met Anupana of workbench projects and had a nice conversation about the fight between design aspects and technical aspects which in the end both wins.
Bharuch
After making quite some contacts at the Makerfest, I got the opportunity to do a workshop on arduino at an Annual science fair at a school in Bharuch, a small town few kilometers up north to 7 graders. This school happens to be in a township of a huge industry called GNFC(Gujarat Narmada Valley Fertilizers and Chemicals) , where I meet some officials who work in the instrumentation dept of the industry and got a small project of making an add on for a 20 year old data logger machine. This was made using arduino and is in service 24x7 since june 2014.
Made some design changes to the open source pcb ruler and also started selling it on tindie.
Projects for Google
The clients started coming in from the makerfest, one of them works very close to Google. They organize events for Google where in they require interactive installations below are a few of them.
The Dart Gun Project was one of them, I learned how make android apps and got them to talk with arduino. Also made similar version called the paint shooter.
Later the floor piano which not only made sounds when stepped on but also served as buttons for a menu systems which plays a video on the screen.
These guys come up with crazy ideas and even crazier deadlines, which is really fun.
Then came a huge project. designing a IoT vending machine from scratch. Challenge Accepted. I started with the mechanical design and send it off to them, they started making it and me working on electronics, web programming, firmware, calculating motor torques, making custom driver board for 30 motors. Went all the way to delhi and the motors stalled under the load. Well it was not getting enough current. Redesigned the board, went to mumbai for another shot and got the thing to work flawlessly.
Goa Fest
Goa fest was a crazy event, everything came together literally at the last minute and all projects worked flawlessly. I had to fly off that afternoon so couldn’t document much. Well made a small vending machine for 5 items, on the front there was a touch screen where user has to open up two cards if they matched, that item would be dispensed. Another project was a cycle competition on gym cycles, there was a big screen which shows the speed of each cycle and first to reach the top speed would win.
Build a Laser Cutter
This was one big, it was one of those project that would just not budge fro the todo list but it finally did. Its made and I’m getting good work out from it.
Drawing robot
It was a small project to build, but I’m so intrigued by its simplicity. There are a lot of controllers out there but the most complete is polargraph, which was displayed are two tedx events.
GOSF flag off event
This was last big project of the year, the event was GOSF(Great online Shopping festival), the Indian version of cyber Monday.
A game was played, which was called well the ‘The Game’. So the way this works is 14 players were given a task which they have to complete in 3 minutes and 30 seconds, when the player completes the task, they scan a RFID card on a reader and the timer for then stops for that player and the score is updated on on the leader board in real time. 4 such rounds were played and in round, the scores were added cumulatively. This project would not have been possible without Pruthvi of Olive Enterprises, who design the kick-ass UI and wrote a robust back end and the control panel for the same.
Here are some screen shots and a video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ersddXrXXPo
Top secret project
Finally at the end of the year, completed a project with company. Can’t which company and what project.
So that was the Great year 2014.
2014 was a great year, and without a shadow of doubt I can say 2015 will be greater!
Keep on Making. Cheers!
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