Make Your Own Robot

Making your own robot might be expensive, but not that tough

Ever since man made the first machine, he has dreamt of making a robot that will relieve him of his daily chores. Industrial robots have been around for a while, so have robotic vacuum cleaners, grass cutters and toys that know how to negotiate obstacles. But a robot that will really be at par with humans seems to be still some years away. This week, I will tell you the basics about robots and maybe inspire you to build one of your own.

The heart: Microprocessor and the project board



The project board is a printed circuit board (PCB) that comes with many cavities for the different processors. It is just like any other video game, but since this is hardcore electronics, a mistake means that you will land up with a burnt unit that the radio repair mechanic down the road will not be able to fix. After this your will need to choose a processor and get some chips and cables to hook all this up.

The mechanics: Servo motors



A servo is what makes the robot move. Like other motors, this too has some wires coming out and a gear on one end to connect the other mechanical parts with it. The difference here is that the servo understands movement in angles and if you want to turn the leg or the hand of your robot forward by 10 degrees you can send it a command through your programme to the microprocessor to change the angle. The more powerful the servo, the harder the work your robot will be able to do. If you plan to build a robot that can climb stairs, not only will you need the servo to lift the weight of the whole mechanics, but also to move in half a degree steps.

The senses: Sensors



Like a human can touch, feel, see, hear and smell, a robot too will need some kind of feedback of the environment around it. In case you want it to climb stairs, you will need to provide sensors in the foot that let it know that you are now touching the surface. In case you want it to turn its head the moment it hears a sound or sees a light, you will need to put in sound or light sensors. You can even put in ultrasonic sensors so that the robot can detect if it is going to bump into something and react accordingly. But all this will make the whole system more complex and you may end up needing more than one processor – maybe one each to handle the senses and mechanics.

Control: Wireless or wired



The cool toy robots started with a wired remote control that could make it jump or walk and then switched on to wireless. With the technology available now, you can choose to integrate a Wi-fi chip to command the robot over the home wireless, or a GSM chip so that you can just send it an SMS to get things done.

Bells and whistles

Remember R2D2 from Wall-E? Well, they all had their own bells and whistles, quite literally. An LED glowing on top of the head showing it is receiving programme to a horn that blows every time it has an obstacle in front, the possibilities are endless.

Programming
This is the difficult part. After the mechanics and the electronics are all in place, you need to be able to write a programme and then teach your robot to follow it. In fact, some robot kit manufacturers give you a simulator where you can actually test out the programme on your computer before you try it out on your expensive robot.
All this might seem a bit overwhelming, but if you have a knack for electronics or mechanics and love building things you will get over the fear. For those who don’t want to build from scratch, there are kits such as Robonova (hitecrobotics.com) or the Johnny 5 (lynxmotion.com), both with dealers in India. The kits will set you back a big amount of money, but then who said robots came cheap.

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The above article appeared in the Indian Express, on Sunday 13th June 2010

Our private Facebook lives

At times the Internet can be a bit dangerous. A search of your name can reveal a lot of information, including your Permanent Account Number, your election ID number and even your full address... a jackpot for identity thieves. This is all someone needs to access your banking information and leave you broke.
They can take a loan, buy a car, or even file fraudulent tax returns in your name. If arrested, they could even give your name and address to the police and fail to show up for a court hearing. In such a case the warrant for arrest will be issued in your name, all because you did not bother about privacy on websites such as Facebook.



A few days back, Verisign caught someone selling personal information of people from Facebook. Accounts that had 10 or less friends were priced at $25 per 1,000 accounts and those with more than 10 friends at $45 for a 1,000. The seller claimed to have access to 1.5 million Facebook accounts.

Facebook has given us some wonderful moments, connecting us with long lost friends and relatives. But it also puts up a lot of personal information about you on the Net. Though for you and me privacy may not be a priority, it is something that you should always keep a tab on.

A great way to start is search your name on Google. If you were to run a search for my name “Gagandeep S. Sapra” — the quotes are important to restrict the search to these words only — you get about 19,000 results out of which some may disclose my email ID and even my office telephone numbers. But my personal details, like my Facebook page, do not turn up in a simple search, thanks to my privacy settings.

So what are these privacy settings? Facebook defines privacy settings into three broad categories — Friends, Friends of Friends and Everyone. What you have to be careful about is the last one, as this is the default for a lot of the settings and can expose your thoughts, your personal information and your relationships to the whole world.
In the last few days Facebook has been receiving a lot of flak from people across the globe, prompting them to simplify their privacy settings. Since it is still not all that simple, here is what you must do to stay safe online.




FRIEND LISTS: Since my parents are also on Facebook, I really don’t want them to see every post I make. We all have a different style of talking to our friends and our family, and this is why friend lists are important. If you have not classified your friends as yet, it is time you did. It could be a simple distribution into friends and family, or a complicated one like school friends, college friends, work friends and family. The good thing here is that you can add the same person to more than one list, and at the time of posting choose which group of friends can see this post. So if you are posting a video you want the world to see, you can select everyone, but if there is something you will like to restrict to your closest buddies just click of the friend list of your choice. To configure your friend lists, click Friends from your left hand menu and select Create a List. The next step is to ensure who can comment or write a status on your wall, as long as you set this up to your friend lists, it is okay, but if it is set to anyone, anyone can search for you, reach your wall and write anything on it.

KEEP YOUR FRIEND LISTS PRIVATE: We all want to show off that we are friends with so many people. The other day, I met someone who mentioned he knew ‘Barrack O Bama’ on Facebook. Well, it’s great to know that you are friends with the ‘American President’, but it is also your responsibility to secure your friends. Hence, it is a good policy to turn off your friends’ visibility to others. Though this may not seem too much right away, you don’t want your friends to get unsolicited marketing email/spam just because they are your friends.

MAKE CONTACT INFORMATION PRIVATE: We all want to put our phone numbers and email addresses online so that our friends can contact us easily. But making this information public is also taking a big risk. The settings has now been simplified into three broad categories — Email & IM, Birthday and Phone Numbers and Address. Since I don’t really want everyone to run a search on me and find out where I live, or when my Birthday is, or what my phone number is, it is best to select the option Friends. If you choose to select the Everyone option, anyone who searches for you will be able to see this information.

RELATIONSHIP STATUS: It is funny to see a status update saying Friend X is now married to Friend Z when they have been married for over a decade and just updated their profile. It is good to share this information with your friends and business contacts, but there will be a flurry of congratulatory messages every time you update the status. So it is better to get rid of the settings for this and make sure this is displayed only to you and your loved ones, not the whole world.

BASIC DIRECTORY INFORMATION: So, who should be able to search for you on Facebook? Go to your directory information settings and make sure you set up options that control what amount of information comes up in a search, who can really search for you or send you a message, or see your interests, your work and educational backgrounds.

A recent report by eweek shows the leak of accounts and there availability on the black market, in case you are interested in the report, you can read it online at the eweek website (Please note this report is not authored by me)

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The above article appeared in the Indian Express, on Sunday 6th June 2010

One car, many screens - Review Dish TV Mobile TV

With traffic jams getting longer by the day, we are slowly getting to a point where commuters in the metros spend up to three hours every day getting to office and back. As you tend to leave home early and return late, most of us end up missing news and other television programmes.

A DVR can record your favorite soap operas so that you can catch up when you finally reach home, but then you can also have a television in the car. While this is not an advisable option if you are planning to watch TV and drive, it makes more sense if you have an SUV or MUV with a chauffeur driving you about.
And now with Dish TV launching its Personal TV, everyone in the vehicle has the option of watching the channel of their choice.



However, priced at Rs 2,45,000 for the startup edition, this is not exactly cheap. The latest version uses a new antenna from Ray Sat and has four screens with individual DTH boxes that help you stream different channels on each screen.
To give you privacy, all TV sets are coupled with wired headphones which can be upgraded to a wireless model at an additional cost. The basic screens come from NECVOX and you can choose a better screen or larger screen if you want.

A single wire downlinks from the RaySat dish antenna to a dish controller in the back of your car which is powered by the car battery — but be careful, for if you run this system with the engine shut, the battery will drain in about an hour. The trunk will also hold the four receivers and Dish TV claims the wiring is done professionally by their trained dealers — but the wiring in the demo car didn’t seem all that professional. Each TV also comes with its individual remote control, just make sure you point it at the right screen.

Sadly, Dish TV hasn’t been able to do a really professional job. They use the same Zenega DTH set top box they use for home which means you will need to change the card after a few months and that won’t be all that easy. They are also not clear how the service will be outside the big cities. As of now, everything looks like a ‘jugaad’, especially the additional infra-red receivers that jut out from under the screens.

The single TV version costs you roughly Rs 1,90,000, while the four-screen variants start at Rs 2,45,000. The annual subscription of about Rs 10,000 is included in the first payment. Since television channels are broadcast on a DTH system using horizontal and vertical polarisation, not all channels are available at one go. You can get up to 162 channels if you put a single TV system in your car, but for multiple TVs, you will get only 81 “popular channels”.
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The above review appeared in the Indian Express, on Sunday May 30, 2010

Dawn of smart mail - The New Hotmail, Coming to A screen Near You

A couple of days back I got an invite from Microsoft to come see what they were doing with Hotmail. Though some of you might get the new feature immediately, the fully upgraded mail will be up in a few weeks. But the fact is that the changes have made Hotmail smarter

The first thing that seemed appealing was Active Views. You can now save time by managing your social networking accounts -- from MySpace, LinkedIn and Facebook -- watching videos embedded in your email without going to another website, viewing Flickr photo albums or even tracking and updating a package status in case you are using UPS or Fedex.



What is also nice is that now you can send up to 10 GB -- yes, I said 10 GB -- in a single email, given the receiver is also on Hotmail; other service providers are unlikely to accept such huge files. Actually the files are uploaded to SkyDrive, a free online storage service from Microsoft, so the recipient will get thumbnails of the photos with options to launch a slideshow or download all the images as a single zipped file.

Now, Hotmail also allows users to edit PowerPoint, Excel and Word documents in the Inbox, even if you don't have Microsoft Office installed on your PC.

A problem for me is that I get a lot of unsolicited emails despite strict spam filtering. I use something called a Smart Filter on my Mac laptop to keep them out of my inbox, but now a similar feature called Sweep is integrated in Hotmail. Pressing Sweep will move/hide or delete emails from selected senders, thus helping you to manage your mailbox. For instance, if you have returned from a holiday, you can use Sweep to show just mail that is most important. You can also program Hotmail to do these sweeps automatically, thus saving time and helping you keep a clean inbox.



The new Windows Live Messenger built into Hotmail has a tabbed conversation window which allows you to easily chat with your friends and has smart features such as video conferencing and even supports High Definition video chat. The new Messenger also pulls in updates from all your social networking websites and video sites and integrates them for you in a single view.





What I loved most was that the new Hotmail and the Live Messenger now integrate pretty well on Windows Phones, iPhones and BlackBerrys. So everything from talking to your friends on the PC or your phone to emailing a document saved in your SkyDrive becomes easy.

Plus, you can also integrate Gmail, Yahoo some other mail ids to Hotmail, though you will need to buy premium services for some of them, and this means even your company mail.
This is truly the dawn of smart mail.

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The Above review appeared in the Indian Express, on Sunday May 23, 2010