Blog

Physical AI and the ChatGPT moment

The Loop Gets Shorter

On AI coding agents, the slow years spent learning Scala, and what happens to the idea of a 'good coder' once code stops being the thing you have to make.

Reflections on My Robotics Journey

A summer trip to India, an old box of electronics projects, and a look back across eighteen years of hardware, robotics, and control.

555

AI for Research

Reflections on using AI-assisted programming for research prototyping, from years of wrestling with Scala to building tools in unfamiliar languages overnight.

Grading Workflow

An Emacs-based workflow for efficiently grading 40 student exam PDFs one question at a time during pandemic-era online teaching.

Automating Student Grading

Documenting five years of iterating on automated assignment checking using GitHub Classrooms and Travis CI for an industrial automation course.

Connecting Overleaf and Github

A step-by-step guide to syncing Overleaf projects with GitHub using Git, enabling local editing and reliable backups for academic writing.

Sustainability and Ethics within Automation Research

An essay exploring the ethical and sustainability dimensions of industrial automation research, written as part of a course on sustainable development.

Setting up Travis

Setting up Travis CI to automatically build and deploy a LaTeX paper from a private GitHub repository.

The CFS Experience

Reflections on a year spent building a Formula Student race car, and what the project actually taught me.

The Course to Rule Them All

What a year on the Chalmers Formula Student project actually teaches you, beyond the 15 credits it's worth on paper.

World's Obsession with Indian Poverty and the Mangalyaan Project

Thoughts on the debate that followed India's Mars orbiter launch, and what a $75m project can and can't be weighed against.

End of Phase One!

A month into CFS14: settling on a team goal, a subgroup goal, and closing out the pre-study phase with data-driven decisions.

On the Team, CFS14

Selected as a project engineer for vehicle electronics on the Chalmers Formula Student 2014 team.

Educational Systems, A Contrasting View

A month of comparing India and Sweden on education, politics, and how people spend time outside their main job.

Reflections: A Month in Sweden

Cooking without spices, flea markets, Slottsskogen, island-hopping the archipelago, and a day trip to Denmark.

A Week Old in Sweden

First impressions of Göteborg: the light, the parks, the pedestrian-first streets, and looking forward to a first winter.

Talks and Workshops at PhotoElectricChefs

The talks and workshops PhotoElectricChefs ran between 2011 and 2013, from line-follower robots at PESIT to freedom hardware talks across Karnataka.

SwaTaha'13

FSMK's first distributed, state-level free software fest, organised with students at PES College of Engineering, Mandya.

Product development talk @SVIT

A talk on product development with free hardware at FSMK's five-day residential workshop at SVIT.

WinterWorkshop'13 - Memories Made!

From participant at IIT Kanpur last year to organizer for FSMK's winter workshop at SVIT, Rajanukunte this year.

How to make a PCB (DIY) at Home

Making a printed circuit board at home with a laser printer, a clothes iron, ferric chloride and an aquarium pump.

The Joys of Being a Staunch Follower

On free software, its rough edges, and why building a missing KiCad component was worth the few extra hours.

Bootload your Arduino

Restoring a lost Arduino bootloader, or turning a plain ATmega into an Arduino chip, with a USBasp or a second Arduino.

Talk at SJCE Mysore

A last-minute train trip to Mysore for an IEEE student-chapter event, a zoo visit, and an ad-hoc talk that somehow worked out.

Report: SJCE, Mysore talk on Freedom Hardware

An introduction to freedom hardware at Tuxedo, SJCE Mysore's yearly FOSS event.

Hack for getting NSK Arduino boards to work on Ubuntu

NSK Arduino boards would not program on Ubuntu. Tying the reset pin high fixed it.

Kanpur - The Journey of a Lifetime

A trainbound trip to a tech fest at IIT Kanpur, thirty-six hours each way, and the memories that came out of it.

Starting off on your first project

Ten steps for getting past the learning curve of a first electronics project, from problem statement to testing.

Report: Freedom Hardware Symposium

Talks, a student project exhibition and a PCB design workshop that drew five times the registrations we planned for.

Freedom Hardware Movement (FHM)

What the Freedom Hardware Movement was, why FSMK and PhotoElectricChefs started it, and what counted as freedom hardware.

The photoelectricchefs

Why Aravind and I started PhotoElectricChefs, what the name could mean, and what we planned to put on it.

Image compression using Discrete cosine transforms.

A small demo showing how the DCT, the transform behind JPEG compression, packs most of an image's energy into just a few coefficients.