FSMK conducted a 5 day residential workshop at svit during the last days of January. We were invited to give a talk on product development using free hardware.


The talk was attended by around 150 students from various colleges spread across karnataka and some from outside karnataka too.

Aravind Started the talk by explaining how a basic hobby idea can be made and then grown into a complete product for development. Explaining this with the evolution of the basic obstacle avoider bot to a remote controlled one to a gesture based bot.

The audience seemed to be enthralled by the demo’s given, and hopefully they have been inspired to work on their own and contribute to the community.

 
SJCE Mysore conducted their yearly tech event,tuxedo this weekend. A completely opensource event where students and industry people present talks and small workshops based on FOSS.

It was quite interesting to see a collage so much into FoSS,unlike the collages i've seen in Bangalore  There was a prof who gave a talk on latex a software for making tech papers. He was using zen walk OS. He also kept inspiring his students to work on linux. To add to that he has contributed few clip arts for paper presentations. Parallelly the linux computing group of SJCE had their event, various coding competitions and talks.

The college has its own hardware and software groups which conduct workshops and also attend various other events.

Our talk was an introduction to freedom hardware ,though many of them were acquainted with various technologies ,the idea of community learning was something new to them.

The session was attended by about 50 students from circuit branches and spread across all semesters . They loved the various demos on kinect and pi. A large group showed interest and came back for offline discussions.

Being optimistic and patiently waiting to see the results of the talk :-)

 
The NSK arduino boards were not working on ubuntu as expected.
 
The fix for this is quite simple,

Connect the reset pin to 3.3V or 5V and then program the arduino. It should work. Im still not sure if this was an error with the FTDI hardware, or if its the software causeing the issue. Im guessing its the ftdi driver on linux which is negating the DTR line. If someone can fix that it would be great.

But as of now, those of you who had the NSK boards can now use it on ubuntu with no issue. Just connect the 5V or 3.3V to the reset pin.