Howdy amigos!
Welcome to ColumbaPyxis Auriga's journal. Nice technical mystical name, huh? We'll come to it soon. To start with, I am an intelligent embedded system for quick response to city-wide emergency calls. Continue reading to know more about me -
My Birth :
It was October 2009. Two of my co-creators Tarin Bansal & Abhishek Jain, owing to their habit of late night discussions and shooting random (and most of the time, stupid) ideas were kicking around random thoughts for the Intel India Embedded Challenge 2010, whose poster they had seen earlier that day in the college. Both were in their second year at that time, with little experience on self-initiated technical projects and no idea whatsoever about embedded systems. Yet they both decided to give it a try and came up with this stupid (Yes, it sounded really stupid back then!) idea of lighting up the roads to help the emergency vehicles (Ambulance, fire-engine, police) reach the emergency locations comfortably and transiently, thereby saving the loss of life and property caused by the delay in arrival of these emergency vehicles. An idea which was thought with the view of using a technical solution to help the society, "Technology for Philanthropy" as they call it. And there I was, basking in the glory of my pre-mature conception, waiting to be nurtured and brought up.
Early Developments :
Two, very small number for a team, four makes it crowded, three is just perfect. Atleast this is what my team thinks. And enters Apoorv Agarwal. The third and final pillar of this team. The three of them brainstormed, improvised on the original idea and prepared an abstract to be sent to Intel IEC. Quark-2010 (The annual techfest of BITS-Pilani Goa Campus) was round the corner and they didn't miss the bang of that single knock. Quark gave them a deadline 2 months before Intel IEC to develop a working prototype and this was exactly what they needed. A basic working model which they could better upon in case they made it to the next round of Intel IEC.
Helping hand from a friend (Shubhankar Mitra), 2 large cardboard sheets, 2 chart papers, a lot of paint, huge number of LEDs, 1 Arduino microcontroller board fused together with some coding and their prototype had just gotten ready 15 minutes before their Quark event (Open Showcase). The results? Continue reading.
Much to their delight, they got, which was possibly the best news they had received in their engineering lives so far, the news of their selection in the 2nd round of Intel IEC. And it was that moment, when they realized that what they thought was a stupid idea, wasn't that stupid after all. It had potential. And the three of them embarked on a journey to extract and build upon that potential.
Achievements :
Competitions
Google will tell you that Columba, Pyxis and Auriga are constellations. Wikipedia will tell you their respective meanings. And I will tell you why I am named ColumbaPyxis Auriga.
Columba - Noah's Dove (Collects information)
Pyxis - Mariner's Compass (Shows the right path)
Auriga - Charioteer (Drives you to the destination)
And hence, the name.
But what exactly am I? What do I do? How do I work? How are they planning to implement me?
Where are they planning to implement me? Who are they (The team)? How is the progress going on? What are they doing right now? and a lot more questions to be answered in my upcoming posts. Stay tuned.
Adios amigos!
Welcome to ColumbaPyxis Auriga's journal. Nice technical mystical name, huh? We'll come to it soon. To start with, I am an intelligent embedded system for quick response to city-wide emergency calls. Continue reading to know more about me -
My Birth :
It was October 2009. Two of my co-creators Tarin Bansal & Abhishek Jain, owing to their habit of late night discussions and shooting random (and most of the time, stupid) ideas were kicking around random thoughts for the Intel India Embedded Challenge 2010, whose poster they had seen earlier that day in the college. Both were in their second year at that time, with little experience on self-initiated technical projects and no idea whatsoever about embedded systems. Yet they both decided to give it a try and came up with this stupid (Yes, it sounded really stupid back then!) idea of lighting up the roads to help the emergency vehicles (Ambulance, fire-engine, police) reach the emergency locations comfortably and transiently, thereby saving the loss of life and property caused by the delay in arrival of these emergency vehicles. An idea which was thought with the view of using a technical solution to help the society, "Technology for Philanthropy" as they call it. And there I was, basking in the glory of my pre-mature conception, waiting to be nurtured and brought up.
Early Developments :
Two, very small number for a team, four makes it crowded, three is just perfect. Atleast this is what my team thinks. And enters Apoorv Agarwal. The third and final pillar of this team. The three of them brainstormed, improvised on the original idea and prepared an abstract to be sent to Intel IEC. Quark-2010 (The annual techfest of BITS-Pilani Goa Campus) was round the corner and they didn't miss the bang of that single knock. Quark gave them a deadline 2 months before Intel IEC to develop a working prototype and this was exactly what they needed. A basic working model which they could better upon in case they made it to the next round of Intel IEC.
Helping hand from a friend (Shubhankar Mitra), 2 large cardboard sheets, 2 chart papers, a lot of paint, huge number of LEDs, 1 Arduino microcontroller board fused together with some coding and their prototype had just gotten ready 15 minutes before their Quark event (Open Showcase). The results? Continue reading.
Much to their delight, they got, which was possibly the best news they had received in their engineering lives so far, the news of their selection in the 2nd round of Intel IEC. And it was that moment, when they realized that what they thought was a stupid idea, wasn't that stupid after all. It had potential. And the three of them embarked on a journey to extract and build upon that potential.
Achievements :
Competitions
- Quark - 2010 : 2nd prize in the Electronics category of Open Showcase.
- Intel IEC - 2010 : Reached the finals. (Top 30 teams from a total of 2170 participant teams)
- Microsoft Imagine Cup - 2011 : Made it to the second round in Embedded Development Category (Competition still going on).
- ICARUS - 2010 : Paper on "Intelligent System for Quick Response to City Wide Emergency Calls" got selected for the first Indian Conference for Academic Research by Undergraduate Students held at IIT-Kanpur.
- ICMLC - 2011: Abhsishek Jain, Apoorv Agarwal, Tarin Bansal "Intelligent System for Quick Response to City Wide Emergency Calls", Proceedings of 3rd International Conference on Machine Learning and Computing, ICMLC 2011, Singapore. Paper accepted for publication in IEEE Xplore.
Google will tell you that Columba, Pyxis and Auriga are constellations. Wikipedia will tell you their respective meanings. And I will tell you why I am named ColumbaPyxis Auriga.
Columba - Noah's Dove (Collects information)
Pyxis - Mariner's Compass (Shows the right path)
Auriga - Charioteer (Drives you to the destination)
And hence, the name.
But what exactly am I? What do I do? How do I work? How are they planning to implement me?
Where are they planning to implement me? Who are they (The team)? How is the progress going on? What are they doing right now? and a lot more questions to be answered in my upcoming posts. Stay tuned.
Adios amigos!
