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Someone Else's sunlight

 Someone else's sunlight- a poem about an unfulfilled longing to contain beauty and the fact that you can't.  I was listening to Monali Thakur singing 'sawar lu' in an interview. I saw this yt short specifically-  https://www.youtube.com/shorts/d4r5cf7irwQ . A swarm of emotions surged through my chest. I felt as if it was melting my heart away. All of it- not just the song- her sweet voice sounded like a lullaby promising safety from danger- almost as a mother to a child singing a song about sunshine and rainbows even when everything around is anything but. Her expressions reeked of innocence and her large eyes wandered all about as if signaling the effortlessness and the innocence in all of that ephemeral beauty. as if was gold for us- is just a regular thing for her divine self to keep. The longing I felt from this- reminded me of some metaphorical instances such as a child trying to capture sunlight in a jar but just can not, or a child who catches the gaze of a beau...

Lines of Code, Miles of Autonomy: The Autonomous car Project - Phase I

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  Problem statement To build a car fully autonomous able to take two locations within our university (eg. Engineering Block and Law Block) and drive the passengers to the location without needing a driver -making decisions with full autonomy such as path planning and obstacle avoidance. The Car We started out by building an EV completely from scratch with out-of-the-garage tools. Another duo of members from JUMakerspace named Jeshurun Solomon and Vedant Kaothekar handled the mechanics and chassis building of this operation.  A collage of our Chassis The Autonomy We began by planning on various approaches by which to make the car autonomous. The first problem was to look out for where the road is and where it isn't (lane detection that is). For this, Tilak bhaiya conceived of this logic- there are sidewalks on both sides of the roads in our university, we can use a 2D LiDAR to detect the edges of these sidewalks and form a map of these roads. I then planned to use a technique ...

Capture the Flag (CTF) - The legendary event that never happened

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 This blog is gonna be short. Ironically, this was supposed to be the first blog on this platform😓. But here we are still. This process started at the beginning of my second semester (almost September - October of the year 2023), was scrapped multiple times( you'll know why with the story), and stretched along to a faint completion to the end of the year 2024. This was a bittersweet trauma to me personally. which is why- I almost have no media documentation in any form of the process. All I got were some reels I got made for Makers' Unfiltered by the end of this wretched process. What is Capture The Flag Capture The Flag is a traditional outdoor game played by kids, scouts, and even the military for training. This is majorly played in the anglosphere countries- like the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and countries in the Europe etc. The core concept of the game is this: Two teams each protect a flag in their territory. The goal is to sneak into the opponent’s side, capture their f...

POV (Persistence of Vision) display- A simple C++ project

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 This is a simple arduino C++ project I've made. This is so simple and basic,  that I'm gonna keep it short.  Let me start with the components I used. The stand for the motor was made crudely with wooden planks and an iron pipe. The hardware guys did a good job for a make-shift work tho. I used a 60 cm scale for mounting the LEDs. The electronic components were:  1. Arduino Nano  2. Charging module 3. buck converters 4. Li-ion batteries 5. WS2812 neopiel LEDs(18 in number) 6. Hall effect sensor This is the code I used uploaded on my GitHub . This is a simple C++ code that uses a Hall effect sensor to estimate the time taken for 1 revolution at each one so the time period used for further calculation is always fresh. And at each degree(computed using the time period used for one revolution), it iterates through every led on the strip and each digit on the bitmap's current row. it the digit on the led's position is a 1, it lights up and if it is a 0, it stays off....

FROM SCRATCH SERIES || CHAPTER 2: विद्युत्वृत्त(The electric Chronicles) || Part 3: Electromagnetism and the great synthesis: The Maxwell Equations

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 Part 3 || Electromagnetism and the great synthesis: The Maxwell Equations || Next the world saw, the dawn of something called: Electromagnetism . The man who bore the next torch, then, was one with little to no schooling, and no math beyond arithmetic. This man reached to true greatness by teaching himself and propelled to the heights of, not only, intellectual greatness but also spiritual one- He refused knighthood and turned down the presidency of the Royal Society. The man is: Michael Faraday(1791 - 1867) .  Michael Faraday Faraday's primary contributions start from one: Electromagnetic Induction  in 1831. Faraday discovered that: A changing magnetic field (a concept he introduced) induces an electric current in a conductor. He discovered it through his experiments involving two metal coils wrapped around an iron ring -> and the observation that a current is generated in the second coil whenever a current was started or stopped in the first. In essence:  He wa...

FROM SCRATCH SERIES || CHAPTER 2: विद्युत्वृत्त(The electric Chronicles) || Part 2: The fusion of two sciences and the birth of electrodynamics

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 Part 2: The fusion of two sciences and the birth of electrodynamics Up until now, Electricity was an isolated study, having nothing to do with magnetism at all, with even the spectacular Mr. Gilbert considering the two forces of nature separate. But this Danish scientist stumbled upon something that was about to change the face of this field of scholarship. The man we're talking about is:  Hans Christian Øersted(1777 - 1851) What happened was, Mr. Øersted was teaching a course on Natural Philosophy and was giving, thus, a demonstration to his students in the University of Copenhagen, Denmark in 1820. During a demonstration regarding the effect electric currents on heating- how electricity passing through a conductor produces heat, he connected a voltaic pile to a platinum wire and then observed- A compass needle lying nearby deflected. He confirmed after multiple repetitions, that this was indeed a result of something magnetic emanating from the electrical wire.  He then...

FROM SCRATCH SERIES || CHAPTER 2: विद्युत्वृत्त(The electric Chronicles) || Part 1: The unit mathematics of electricity - Coulomb's law

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 In chapter I, we experienced the origin story of it all. In this one, we are going to cover all the foundational concepts concerning electricity, magnetism and fusing the two- electromagnetism . This ride will comprise less rigor with regards to history on account of the necessity of covering the concepts which are increasingly complex hereon, in a short literary piece.  Part 1: The unit mathematics of electricity - Coulomb's law   The person that would come first in my list in this trail is none other than the person who first mathematized the charge: Charles-Augustin de Coulomb(1736 - 1806) .  Charles-Augustin de Coulomb Coulomb was a French military officer, engineer and physicist. He wrote a series of seven memoirs to the Royal Academy of Sciences in Paris where he formalized his law and derived it using his invention: The Torsion Balance . His memoirs were titled:  See, Newton, till then has already established the relation between gravitational ...