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
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 shieldUltrasonic sensor and PIR sensorGPS 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.
Feedjitlocation widget is an extremely cool widget which shows you details about your blog visitors. It shows the location of your blog’s visitor, the operating system which he or she used while visiting your blog, the time when he or she visited your blog and the browser used.
But feedjit’s site doesn’t give an option for wordpress.com bloggers on their home page. I eventually found something that works for wordpress.com users. I found this link in one of WordPress’ forums. Copy the code and paste it in your blog’s text widget. Wonder why they did not display it in their homepage.
Apropos could be the most helpful command for a beginner. Almost every command has a manual page that gives description about what it does along with its advanced options. But the man command cannot do much for a beginner who doesn’t know the name of the command he/she wants to know about. This is where apropos comes to the rescue.
Apropos searches the man pages for keywords provided by the user. Its like google for man pages. So you can just type apropos to know more about.
Example
amrita@amrita-desktop:~$ apropos gcc
c89-gcc (1) - ANSI (1989) C compiler
c99-gcc (1) - ANSI (1999) C compiler
gcc (1) - GNU project C and C++ compiler
gcc-4.4 (1) - GNU project C and C++ compiler
i486-linux-gnu-gcc (1) - GNU project C and C++ compiler
i486-linux-gnu-gcc-4.4 (1) - GNU project C and C++ compiler
It is a good practice to read the man page of any new command you learn. So open up your shell and man apropos now itself 🙂
Vishnu Ramesh's life log 