What I’m upto

Its been a long vacation from the things I love the most. I’m back again 🙂

Its vacation time and I’ve got lots of free time. To be specific 24hours per day. So I decided to learn Java. Something I’ve always wanted to. Next semester I’ll be learning it anyway. So I thought I’d take a head start. Another thing that’s been keeping me busy is a wargame called bandit hosted by overthewire.org. It’s really interesting. Worth a try if you’re wasting away your vacation at home. Everybody is bound to get bored eventually unless you fill in your vacation with some fun stuff like I did. Anyway bandit is really easy. It provides you with necessary know-how required at each level. It’s just another fun way of learning. In my opinion, the best way of learning.

Hope you too try something awesome and enjoy. Good luck

What I’ve been doing

I haven’t posted anything here in a very long time. Lots of stuff has happened and I’ve longed to blog about them. But, I guess I’m just too lazy. Wish it wasn’t like that. I’ve been busy with third semester courses and preparations for ICPC. We qualified for ACM ICPC both Amritapuri and Kanpur Regionals. But wont be able to attend Kanpur  regionals because they clash with our end semester exams. Now exams are over and I’m eagerly waiting for Amritapuri Regionals.

Programming Camp in Bangalore Campus

As part of our ICPC preparations, Team Bhaktans (Sai, Akhilesh and myself) got a chance to attend a programming camp in Bangalore conducted for Amrita teams from all campuses. Camp was conducted by Harsha Suryanarayanan. Harsha is among the coolest people I’ve met till now. Even his topcoder handle is cool “humblefool“. He introduced us to topcoder. We solved a few problems to get used to the topcoder arena. Harsha gave us a lot of programming tips and taught us how to get better using topcoder. He told us the advantages of coding on paper rather than directly on a PC. This way you don’t have to think while you type and hence lesser chances of making mistakes. And participated in my first Single Round Match (SRM) in topcoder. SRM  is basically a programming game. It is divided into three phases:

• Coding Phase: You get 75minutes to solve the given problems. Now problems fetch you points based on their hardness. The faster you solve them, the more points you get. After the coding phase is 15mins break.
• Challenge Phase: During the 15mins challenge phase you can read codes submitted by other people. If you feel that their code wont work for all the test case then you can challenge them. You can throw test cases at their code. A successful challenge gets you 50points. But a failed challenge sets you back by 25points.
• System Testing Phase: During the system testing phase your code is tested with a big load of testcases. If your code fails either during the challenge phase or the system testing phase, you don’t get any points from that particular problem.

My first SRM was a failure. I couldn’t solve even the simple 250point problem. But I met Gautham and Sreehari of Team Tamals. There is no limit to how many cool people you can meet in a single day. The next day he wound up the session with more problems and tips. This was our first team outing and it turned out to be quite productive and fun filled.

After we returned to college I participated in the next SRM. I think I did quite well. Solved the 250 and 500 point problems and a successful challenge. I’m now green rated. Hoping to improve myself in the future 😀

Hide and Seek in College

All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy

I’m 19 years old and I’m not ashamed to say that I played hide and seek in college. In fact I wish more of my friends had joined me. It must be the design of our college building that made the game exceptionally fun. I’d say its the best strategy game I’ve ever played. Yes, I’ve played Age of Empires and it doesn’t come close. Our college has long corridors so it is a little difficult to outrun the seeker. That made it all the more fun. I cant really explain much about it. You gotta try it yourself.

Hosting Judges

The online round of ACM ICPC Amritapuri regionals was to be conducted and the judges were Anil Kishore and Pratik Tandel. I was able to host the judges. They were really friendly and gave us (Karthikeyan, Nakul and myself) a lot of tips to improve ourselves. The online round went well and we qualified.

Thats all for now. I hope I blog more often 🙂

Arduino Workshop

Arduino UNO

Arduino is an electronics platform which is meant for artists, students and hobbyists. It is extremely easy to use. Arduino was created at Interaction Design Institute Ivrea, Italy by Massimo Banzi and Casey Reas. It’s hardware and software is open source. This is the first time I’m hearing about open source hardware. It means that the layout and schematics of the hardware is available to the user. This means that anyone can make their own arduino board after refering the original schematics. I attended a workshop on arduino at Ettimadai Campus of Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, thats how I know about it. Arduino is programmed using simple C language. Its IDE came bundled with a lot of examples to make anyone feel homely. Arduino UNO uses the ATmega328P microcontroller.

The workshop was conducted by Ajith Peter sir. He is an electronics enthusiast. He has a lot of sensors and shields. He let us play with all the cool stuff we had. He is really friendly. He is presently doing his PhD in IIT-B. The workshop was conducted by Dept of Computational Engineering and Networking. CEN’s HOD, Soman sir also presided over the workshop. He is an expert in maths. A talk with him helped me to visualize the first and second semester maths geometrically. I had no idea what they meant. He helped me relate it to the simple high school maths.

InduinoX Board

We did a lot of stuff with Arduino. The first program we did was to make the LED on the board blink. Ajith sir explained the importance of this simple piece of code. It is the equivalent of the “Hello World!” program which every programmer begins with. Arduino doesn’t come bundled with any in-built output devices, so debugging is a problem. This is where the simple blink comes to the rescue. You can insert the blink code between modules of your program to check their functionality. We played with a lot of sensors. We used the Passive Infra Red(PIR) sensor to build a motion detector. Ultrasonic range finder to findto any obstruction in front of the device. Then we used GPS module to get gps data and used the serial monitor to display the data. We even connected a LCD display to the arduino and learnt how to use it. We learnt about serial communication, UART (Universal Asynchronous Receiver Transmitter), I2C protocol. Ajith sir also showed us how to build a circuit board using toner transfer and told us about the importance of spacing and thickness of lines on a circuit board. He introduced us to softwares like Eagle CADsoft and fritzing which maybe used to build schematics of various circuits and then create the circuit board using toner transfer.

Arduino with music shield

Ultrasonic sensor and PIR sensor

GPS module connected to Arduino

The workshop was fun-filled and at the same time very informative. We’re planning to conduct a similar workshop in Amritapuri campus.

Arduino – Coming soon

I’m now in Ettimadai campus, attending a workshop on arduino. Working on arduino is really interesting. Can’t wait to tell you about it.

Inky – PACMAN