Old Projects
This is work that I did as an undergraduate in Computer Science at IIT Delhi (2003-2007).
FPGA accelerators for protein structure prediction (August '06 - May '07)
Advisors: Professor M.Balakrishnan, Professor Kolin Paul
We (a team of 3 undergraduates) showed that FPGA accelerators can be effective for protein structure prediction as this problem has a lot of inherent parallelism. We demonstrated this by designing FPGA accelerators which gave a speed-up of 5 over Bhageerath (a protein structure prediction software developed by the Supercomputing Facility for Bioinformatics & Computational Biology at IIT Delhi).
Our project was chosen as the best undergraduate research project in Computer Science at IIT Delhi for 2006-07. Here is our project report and here is an article about the project in the department newsletter.
Vision Guided Robot Navigation (August '05 - December '05)
We
(2 undergraduates) built our own mobile platform, used a VIA single
board computer running Linux off a USB pendrive to control it and
OpenCV for camera calibration, edge detection (Hough and Canny), kalman
filtering for tracking features. Using the tiled pattern of the lab
floor, our robot could self-localise at speeds of upto 1 m/s.
For controlling the motors, we designed our own motor control PCB built using a PIC16F876A microcontroller.
Micromouse - autonomous maze
solving robot (November'04 - January '05)
This
robot won the Judges’ Special Mention at Yantriki (Annual All-India
Inter College Robotics competition) at the Indian Institute of
Technology, Bombay.
We made an autonomous robot capable of sensing
its sorroundings and reaching the center of an unkown maze. Our robot
was driven by stepper-motors (scavenged from old printers) and had
GPD202 IR-rangers for detecting the walls.
Cliffhanger - International Machine
Design Contest, Techfest 2004
I
built a robot that could climb a vertical, loosely hung rope, negotiate
a 90 degree turn in the rope, disengage from the rope and finally burst
balloons placed on top of a platform. In addition to securing the 4th position out of 20 teams, I was also awarded the prize for the best design. I was the only freshman participating in this event.
This competition had teams from all over India, Nepal and Singapore.
Balloon bursting
robot
We won a balloon bursting competition with this robot in 2006 at IIT Delhi's Inter College Robotics Competition.
Embedded Systems
Thermal Conductivity Measuring Apparatus (January ’06 – May ’06)
This machine can be used to measure the thermal conductivity of poor thermal conductors. It has been built in compliance with an ASTM standard. I was involved with analog design (interfacing thermocouples to instrumentation amplifiers), control system (PID controllers to maintain temperatures of the heat sources) and the software that enables users to use the apparatus.
Part-time work with: Pravak Cybernetics (P) Ltd., New Delhi, India
Embedded UDP/IP stack for Vehicle Tracking System (March '05 - July '05)
I implemented a dialer to negotiate a PPP connection as well as a UDP/IP stack for AVR ATMega16 microcontrollers. I also wrote code for communicating with a U-Blox GPS module and sending the acquired data over either the GPRS or GSM network.
The overall application was vehicle tracking and management using the GSM/GPRS networks to transfer data from the vehicle to the base server. The modem used was a Wavecom WISMO Q2403A with the AT commands interface.
Part-time work with: Visesh Infotech, New Delhi, India
General Purpose ATMega128
Board (Dec '05 - Feb '06)
I built a general purpose controller board (around the ATMega128 microcontroller) with motor drivers (L298), RF module (CC1000), RS232, provision for external interrupts and a boot-loader for programming the microcontroller.
Porting BrickOS for ATMega128 (Jan '06 -
May '06)
For our Operating Systems course project we ported BrickOS
onto the ATMega128 micro-controller (8 bit MCU, Harvard Architechture, 4Kb RAM, 128Kb program memory).
We used the same
board that I had
made.
To demonstrate our OS we ran dining philosophers in which
the trigger for eating/sleeping for one of the philosophers was from a
Sonar Ranger.