APOGEE 2008 - Inside

A few names which come to my mind when I think of APOGEE 2008: (in psuedo-random order)
Gautam, Jyoti, Sumanth, Reeshav, Dhiraj, Ravindra, Divya, Vinay Soni, Pradeep, Ritesh, Raja, Sagnik, Ali, Rajat, Jeffery, Mohit, Gurukaran, Puri, Ankit Mittal, Shubham, Tarun.
Favourite moment: 11th March 2008 1400 hrs:
Lunch at Sky. Thinking about inaug... almost all the projects were working :). In all it should be 20+.
Scariest moment: 11th March 2008 0600 hrs:
I woke up. F*ck! Oh I am in chota wala lab (2138). Oh fish! Why was I sleeping.. Oh fish! what's the time? Oh fish! just 6 hours left for assoc room inaugration. Oh fish! We need to move all the stuff to the assoc rooms. Oh fish! Where are all the people? Gautam... uth saale... kuch kar... just 6 hours... kya kare.. oh fish! Tu kuch kar yaha... main hostel jaake logo ko utha ke lata hun. (Dub: Gautam... wake up... do something.. just 6 hours.. what to do..oh fish!... You do something here.. I'll go to hostel and get people from there.) Ring Ring... Hello Jyoti!.. tu kaha hai.. MB...abhi tak so rahi hai.. just 6 hours left. Jaldi aa... main hostel jaake logo ko utha ke lata hun (Dub: Ring Ring... Hello Jyoti!.. where are you.. Meera Bhawan...sleeping till now.. just 6 hours left. Come soon..I'll go to hostel and get people from there. )
Funniest moment: 13th March 2008 0930 hrs:
Explaining the projcet to the judge; and I was wearing cargo ( it should be called pyjama actually) and T-shirt which read "I am Kind of a Big Deal" :D. Actually I was supposed to change before the judging seesion, was on the way to hostel to do the same at around 0845 hrs. But then got to know that judges have already arrived, so aborted the plan and went back. (I am not too sure of the date for this one :D)
Five things which make me happy as Co-ord, Instrumentation Forum, APOGEE 2008:
- Assocs collaborated to conduct events
- Over two-thirds of the projects on the display in our assoc were working. ( Generally percentage is pretty low)
- Good participation from all three batches in our assoc (don't expect anything from psenti-semites)
- Our assoc had two rooms full of projects and workshops
- Our Group leader called me after Val-D to congratulate us
Five things which don't make me happy as Co-ord, Instrumentation Forum, APOGEE 2008:
- The events were not handled so well by Instru assoc.
- Wireless Quest (new event, required particiapants to design radio receiver) failed even after the (not-so :P) hard work
- Abstract submission was vague. Only projects which were being done seriously should had been submitted. Inspite of my efforts to do so, finally it dint happen properly.
- Guest lectures were not given due attention
- Publicity was not so effective.

APOGEE 2008

Well, its time for APOGEE 2010, but alas, I am lagging by two years. Lets not wait further, lets do it this time. APOGEE 2008. Truly, one of the most memorable events of my life and I am sure that it will remain so even at the time of APOGEE 2050. APOGEE i.e. A Professions Oriented Gathering over Educational Experience is the national (rather, its international now) level inter-college technical festival hosted by BITS Pilani.

At the time of APOGEE 2008, it was in my third year, and I was the co-ordinator for Instrumentation Forum ( association of students of Electronics and Instrumentation ). So I was responsible for all the activities of Instru assoc for APOGEE 2008. We were some 70+ students. Together we organized guest lectures; technical events (Parishod, Open hardware, Virtuosity, Garovista, Siddhi, Wireless Quest, Breadstroming, Quintronics) in collaboration with some other assocs; workshops; and we prepared some prize winnig projects :).

Events... lets not discuss it. I accept that we could had done better in organization of the events. But projects and workshops.. they were the highlights.. that is what made the APOGEE 2008 memorable, atleast for me.

Workshops - we conducted two workshops - One on MEMS and another one on Industrial Automation. These were not professional workshops. It was like students (primarily first year, guided by third year students) study and present some (not necessarily :P) new technical topic to the junta during APOGEE. So one group prepared on Micro Electro-Mechanical Systems and the other group prepared on Industrial Automation. Both the groups had some 8-10 furst year students guided by 1-2 third year student(s). The MEMS group studied the various concepts/processes involved in MEMS and explained it with one example (I think it was Cantilever). They were planning to use some software tool called Sugar, but I don't remember if they finally did it or not. The other Industrial Automation Group prepared a working model of Tile Industry. They integrated it with LabVIEW also. The model showed the various staged involved in manufacturing a tile. In reality, manufacturing of tiles invlove very high temperatures for baking and stuff. So this was just a model, and it prepared models of tiles :D. It was working in the sense that there was a conveyor belt, controlled by motor, some other moving parts like a 'heavy' weight which can be moved up and down, and is used to flaten the stuff to form tiles and so on. Both of them got reasonably good response.

Projects - This was the thing. Our show in Project competition was lot better than previous times :). We won first prize in Automation for 'Digital Display'; first in Industrial Processes and Automation for 'Automation of Tile Industry'; first in Signal Processing for 'Speech Controlled Wheel Chair'; and second in Signal Processing for 'Automated Linesman'. Apart from project competition, some projects won prizes in events too - first in Siddhi ( in the module which required a robot to imitate some biological organ/organism ) for 'Octapod'; and first in Open Hardware for 'Speech Controlled Wheel Chair'. Apart from the winners, some other projects were - Surface Colour Plotter, Robotic Arm, Free Space Optics (this was inspired from my and gautam's first APOGEE's project), GRID - Automated Path Tracking Robot, Writing robo, Automated Machine Error Detection System, PoleClimber, Table Ice Hockey, Breaks Unleashed, etc. Most of these project plus may other whose name I dont remember (sorry) were working :). I was really happy and satisfied as we had more than 20 projects in working condition.

I'll upload the photos on some online album and update the link in this post soon.

This all was just data. And obviously I remember something more than just data from this memorable event. If I post it here, it will be too long post, so lets split it. I'll 'blog' and not report in my next post on APOGEE 2008.