Ananthan's Blog

Have recently bought a small batman key chain from amazon. It  has a small button when pressed lights the batman eye with white light and sounds a pathetic sound (:(). So I thought of opening it. It has enough space to put some custom electronics. So I thought of customising it a bit. This is what it looks before customising. This is what it looks when adding a little bit of electronics into it. It has an esp8266 with 3 SMD LED (Red, Green, Blue) that can be independently controlled. It has a small speaker (from a headset) which plays a pac man tone. It is powered with a 3.7 V Lipo battery with an option to charge with an USB cable. Batman keychain is playing pacman tone... :) I know it's a bit wierd, but couldnt find a good tone (which can be expressed as a piano tone like C4, B#2, ...) for batman. Will replace it once found a better one. Things to add further Pressing for a long time will enable a hotspot Option to change the tone by writing it to ...

In order to counter the rotating torque from the previous single rotor version, one more propeller is added. The second propeller rotates counter clockwise and both torques will cancel each other (Only if both propellers are rotating at same speed). This the video of it flying with restriction. I have attached a a small weight to its bottom. Even though the counter torque is cancelled, it can't be controlled. Very small variation in alignment will drive the MAV crazy. This is an attempt to control the drone remotely with a joystick. Had changed the body from plastic (from plastic IC tube) to general purpose PCB board. The individual propellers are controlled from a joystick (logitech f710). The controller is an esp8266 es-11 WiFi chip. The telemetry data are send using a python program that run on my computer. Both the WiFi chip and my computer are on the same network.

This is a small MAV (Micro Areal Vehicle) I created out of simple household stuffs. Though this one can't be controlled, it is fun to watch it fly. :) :) :) I have loosely connected the power supply so that once it start flying, the counter rotating torque forces the whole MAV to rotate. So after a few sec the wire connecting power supply (battery) will automatically get removed and I can catch the MAV before it crash into walls. :) This one is a slow motion video of it flying. It is hard to video it while flying. Since it is not stable it will crash itself into walls after a few seconds. I am trying to get it fly vertically upwards without any deviation. See this instructable ( https://www.instructables.com/id/Home-Made-Micro-Aerial-Vehicle-MAV-in-5-Min/ ) for more videos/photos.

This is an another theme I created for Plymouth (   a bootsplash for Linux). This will replace your native boot and shutdown animation. Credits to Joel Roset for the FX animation. A step by step instruction of how to install this theme is in this video.

Bored of having the same boot animation screen again and again? There are plenty of Plymouth themes available out there. This is a theme I created by slicing some cool gif files I found online. You can download the theme and find the installation steps on my github account. ( https://github.com/krishnan793/PlymouthTheme-Cat )  The theme is created for Ubuntu 16.04. But this can be installed on previous versions with slight modification. If you have a slow computer then you can watch the whole animation loops. (The VM I used to record the screen was fast though. :))

I am working on a small self balancing robot for couple of days. It is not completed yet. To minimise the cost I used breadboard itself as a frame instead of a wooden or an acrylic one. 1 x Breadboard (small) 1 x Arduino pro mini 1 x IMU MPU 6050 1 x Motor driver 1x Powerbank (TP Link) 2 x DC Motor Things done Get raw data of IMU Get pitch,roll and yaw Control DC Motors from arduino Thing that need to be done Implement PID Tune Kp,Ki, and Kd.

This is a project I had completed while doing internship at EY. The idea is to automate inventory and the stock checking process without any human intervention. Today these are all done using human resource. This is a really tiresome work because it involves manually inspecting each pallet (box) and read the QR/Bar code associated with it.  Instead consider a swarm of drones (a dozen or a hundred drones) go and check each pallet and complete the whole inventory and stock checking process in just a few minutes. This is a proof of concept design in which a drone uses a blueprint to travel a particular path and then reads and analyse each stock item and update it in the warehouse management system. All these things are done in real time. The drone used here is Parrot bebop and is implemented in ROS. Instead of actual boxes, QR code is fixed to symbolise each palette. The ROS implementation makes the project scalable. The video of the project is shown below.