Gyanix: Part 3

Filling the voids…

5 min readJan 25, 2019

We are at the final article in the series. Looking back, we have come a long way from starting out with hobby projects, making it better, fiddling with a bunch of things and understanding hardware in a deeper and broader sense. As said previously, the jar is filled with rocks and pebbles and it is time to fill the voids in the jar with sand.

This article would talk about stuff you can delve into in addition to what would be specific to your branch of study. These sand particles would open avenues to make your daily life better and more interesting. This an attempt to showcase a glimpse of a bigger picture. Finally, the article ends with a tinge of philosophy :P

Coding is important!

Many of us as staunch electronics engineers feel that coding is not meant for us, or rather we don’t spend quality time on it. In a broader sense, I realise coding is more of a way of thinking and analysing what is on our plate. It teaches us on creating efficient structures, scaling it up, making the best use of available resources, and more importantly, to innovate. A simple code can be the bridge between “what am I doing?” and “how can I do it better?”.

A friend of mine strongly recommends the course CS50 from Harvard (https://cs50.harvard.edu/college/ ) for starting out on coding from scratch. There are various platforms online like Hackerrank, CodeNation, CodeChef etc for competitive coding, if you’re interested.

Don’t you nix Unix :P

Unix is very comfortable when it comes to customisation and scalability. Also, most of the things that you’ll be working on once you join work will be unix based. If you can make time, learning unix/linux funda while at college can help you loads.

Deciphering Technical Documents

Datasheets, white papers, specifications etc seem to be in runes initially. But they are the source of enlightenment about what you are working on. Datasheets of microcontrollers you’ve worked can be a starting point.

Try understanding various features supported by the MCU, it’s configurations and about various registers in it. Now try programming the registers in various permutations and see what happens. Another easy way of understanding technical documents is by tring to understand the waveforms (they do speak a thousand words!).

This can be extended with specification documents of simple hardware protocols that you have come across at college; I2C, SPI, USART etc.

Some Miscellaneous stuff

IEEE RWEP: IEEE Real World Engineering Projects, an IEEE collaboration with academics from around the world, is a repository of investigatory projects in various fields of EE like image processing, control systems, electrical systems, digital hardware. It is a good opportunity for 1st/2nd year undergrads to get a feel of what happens in various fields and can narrow down their field of study.
MS Excel: Suggested by one of my friends, this seems to be an interesting pastime to play with! (Sounds weird, but do try it out!)
SystemVerilog and UVM: One thing that we don’t get to cover in our college curriculum is SystemVerilog and how complex the field of hardware verification has become. If you could make time, this could be a good learning curve. EDA playground can help you with hands on experience. Further down the line is UVM concepts.
Version control: Suggested by a friend, portals like git are repositories for seamless team work across physical barriers. It is also a one point safe, shelving the entire history of work on the project.

Some Philosophy

The four-year transform (pun intended :) ) did change my domain of reference, my perspective. So, these are some takeaways that I’d like to share:

Fundamentals are very important: Ofttimes, the problem exists with some minor issue that eludes us. Logically breaking the issue into fragments till the very end helps us get to the fix.
The big picture motivates: How does what we do impact the grand scheme of things? Why should we do what we do at all? Difficult many a times to get to the answer, though :P
Curiosity! : The more implementation specific I got, more dreadful working became. But things got interesting when there was that iota of doubt here and there. They were those flickers of sunshine to break the monotony.
Keep poking your nose everywhere :P Something out there might interest you.

The finish line, yet another start…

I’ll be back with another thought fox that creeps out of nowhere soon (google out “though fox” sometime!). These set of articles are an account of my experience fiddling with things and that of some of my friends at college. There are galaxies of stuff out there yet to be explored. Hope this motivates us to take that leap.

Further, these articles are meant to give it’s readers a bunch of jars to pick candies from. But our bellies have limited and varying space. So feel free to pick and choose the ones that you like. There ain’t no bad candies :)

Links to the previous articles:

(PS: Thanks to Arnab Saha, Shubham Bhawalkar, Sachin and Santhana Bharathi for their inputs; Suresh A N for picking the right pics)