Educator= Designer+Facilitator+Researcher, Engineer
Electronics
Projects done as an electronics engineer
Spotfire Data Visualisation
Context: Innovation project at Texas Instruments, 2018
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Situation: The team generated a lot of data by simulating circuit designs in the verification phase. But the generated data was only compared to limits and discrepancies were flagged. All the information in the trends in data was lost and some bugs were missed. Spotfire was available to all employees but there was a steep learning curve and the engineers didn't see the value of an 'aesthetic add-on'.
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Solution:
Spotfire template to make it easy to get started
Examples to spark possibilities
Components to fit into the existing process and support engineer's intuitive reasoning
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Impact:
Knowledge sharing with the team and supported adjacent teams to ramp up
Award for innovative contribution to the team
Publication in Texas Instruments India Technical Conference (TIITC) - 1 of 5 papers selected in Design Verification among 400+ submissions.
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Learning:
Tools with low floors are necessary to expand possibilities for engineers too!
Sample projects help a lot with getting started, especially as they help with the blank page barrier
Tools to think with work even in high skill contexts as they help externalising ideas, tabling them for discussion and review
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What next?
How might we use data analysis tools to make scientific and engineering reasoning and creating accessible to all?
Efficient Sensor Node System
Context: Major Project (1 year long) as a part of a team of 3 towards the requirements for B.Tech degree with advisors from NITK and Texas Instruments, 2016-2017
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Situation: There are a lot of new applications for distributed sensor systems where we need battery lives of the order of 10 years (as compared to the currently available lifetime of a couple of days). One promising framework is the Single Inductor Single Output (SISO) buck converter. But this can only support one output voltage.
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Solution: Extend the framework to a Single Inductor Dual Output (SIDO) buck converter. This was a completely new design being evaluated by Kilby Labs, Texas Instruments. We designed the circuit logic and analyzed the system stability. The mathematical stability analysis from choosing appropriate modelling tools to proving the stability of the design was my main responsibility.
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Impact:
The design was further refined to consider non-ideal factors and the chip was fabricated by Texas Instruments
The project led to a 2nd author publication in VLSID 2017, the biggest electronics design conference in India
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Learning:
Simulink and Matlab were excellent tools to think with to begin exploring modelling frameworks
Varying abstract and concrete representations significantly helps with framing and re-framing problems to arrive at creative solutions
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What next?
How might we use the circuit design and simulation environment to enable playful exploration and tinkering of different ideas, concepts and models?
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Analysis of Electrostatic Discharge (ESD)
Context: Internship project at Texas Instruments, May 2016
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Situation: The team was having different failures due to ESD and did not have any consolidated experience or expertise about it. My project was to learn about ESD, apply it to the existing failures, talk to different verticals and consolidate all the information into presentations for the team and documentation for future reference.
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Solution: I learnt about ESD from various sources, documenting along the way.
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Impact:
The presentation was very well received and led to detailed discussions among the team
I was offered a job offer at the end of the internship
When I joined TI after a year, multiple people appreciated the presentation as a useful reference
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Learning:
Documentation matters. Consolidated information that helps people understand situations and make decisions is necessary for smooth functioning.
Communication skills for talking to engineers from different verticals, organizing information to align with the engineers' intuition, and presentation competencies.
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What next?
How might we use documentation to support and scaffold users of tools with generating ideas and getting unstuck?
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Message Transmission in adhoc networks
Context: Internship project at Indian Institute of Science, June 2015, 2 months
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Situation: I contributed to the exploratory stage of a bigger project to design efficient message transmission algorithms for soldiers on the ground.
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Solution: My contributions involved modelling the situation in Matlab using appropriate probability distributions and designing and modelling different communication protocols. I also collected empirical measurements of time required for message transmission in different protocols and submitted a back-of-the-envelope proof for the obtained empirical results.
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Impact:
The work was continued by a PhD student
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Learning:
This was my first experience of modelling and I was fascinated by how modelling helps us design and test solutions for the real world
I also learnt about the exploratory stage of mathematical projects and how empirical results can serve as a foundation for analytical proofs.
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What next?
How might we lower the floors of modelling tools for students and teachers to make it more common in K-12 classrooms?
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Cashew Quality Measurement
Context: Project-based course as a part of a team of 2 at NITK, Jan 2016, 1 semester
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Situation: The project proposal that we chose was to make a device that farmers could use to measure the quality of cashews non-invasively. There were invasive chemical procedures available but those caused wastage and raised issues about sampling. The cashew research institute said that the quality of cashews is proportional to their moisture content which is proportional to their electrical capacitance. So the problem was framed as design a tool to measure capacitance of the order of pico-farads.
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Solution: My contribution was the initial design idea and breadboard prototype. We found that the method was not accurate but it was precise so the problem could be solved using calibration and scaling. We built a more rugged prototype using a soldered board and arduino.
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Impact:
The work was taken further by the cashew research institute
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Learning:
Hardware simulations and actual working are two very different things, non-idealities abound
To make a sensor all you have to find is a proportional electrical quantity to measure
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What next?
How might we use sensing and measurement as tools of inquiry in science learning?
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Scalable ECG Display
Context: Project-based course as a part of a team of 3 at NITK, Jan 2015, 1 semester
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Situation: The project proposal was from a startup in telemedicine. They were struggling with displaying ECG graphs on devices with different resolutions. ECG graphs have sharp transitions which have critical information. So sub-sampling wasn't an option. The graphs had to be scaled while maintaining their morphology.
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Solution: My contribution was the design of the algorithm and the Matlab implementation. We explored different ways of aggregating information with minimum loss of information and almost no change in morphology and finally used a moving average filter. We submitted a C implementation of the algorithm.
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Impact:
The work was incorporated by the startup (Cardiac Design Labs, Bangalore)
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Learning:
Information (Signals) is constantly being transmitted and displayed and needs to be manipulated in different ways while maintaining various measures of quality
Some languages are more supportive of prototyping than others
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What next?
How might we hide complex details to make algorithm design accessible to all learners?
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