February 20, 2011
School of Engineering, Coimbatore
Anokha’s engaging hands-on workshops drove the conference forward full speed on the first day, long before its official inauguration.
These workshops provided students opportunities to gain practical experience and become aware of recent developments in their respective fields. They allowed students to apply their working knowledge in an environment encouraging enthusiasm and love for science and technology.
The Fuel Cell Hybrid Systems and Wind Mill Hybrid Systems workshops were conducted by GREEN ADD+, a company that strives to accelerate sustainable growth at a national and international level by advancing sustainability economics and green technologies.
The workshop coordinators responsible for inviting GREEN ADD+ to host the seminars chose to connect with the company because its initiatives corresponded with Anokha’s themes of national security and sustainability. The focus of these two-day training courses was environmental security.
In Fuel Cell Hybrid Systems, students were introduced to various green technologies including wind, solar, water, and fuel cell (FCT).They were acquainted with the elements of fuel cell systems like fuel cells, photovoltaic’s, electronics, mechanics, software and carbon footprint analysis of FCT, cost benefits and consumption analysis of FCT, and applications of FCT.
“The main thing participants should gain from this workshop is an understanding of facts about the environment,” said Srinath V.M., event manager and final year Amrita B Tech student.
“Our institution promotes an equal balance between humans and nature. We live in harmony with nature. In this sense, this eco-friendly workshop is very important to our students.”
To employ knowledge acquired during training sessions, students worked together to build a FCT powered car.
In Wind Mill Hybrid Systems, students also learned about green technologies, and received information on wind systems development kit modules, technical and financial modeling of wind systems, and the basics of wind technology. The seminar went beyond the books to teach students about wind mill operations.
“We have always seen wind mills on TV or in books or magazines, but we don’t know how they work internally. By assembling everything themselves, students are learning about how a wind mill’s components work, and in what conditions,” shared Apurv Kumar, event manager and final year Amrita B Tech student.
Participants constructed model wind mills. After getting a basic idea of how a wind mill operates, they used special hardware to erect the framework and designed its electrical circuits. Next, they integrated the mechanical and electronic elements like the wind generator, system controllers, anemometer, and battery recharging circuit.
Lastly, students checked the models’ electrical output to determine their level of functioning and efficiency. The models represented wind mills that work during daytime and nighttime hours; in the day when sun and wind are present, and in the night when sun is absent but wind is blowing.
“We would really like to take this workshop to a higher level because renewable energy is in great demand in the world,” said Mr. Apurv.
The Facebook Apps workshop made students familiar with original Facebook applications that can be used to enhance one’s online presence and effectively promote their work.
These included social plug-ins which allow you to create stimulating social experiences for your users, social channels that permit communication between friends, authentication, a single sign-on mechanism across the web, and open graph protocol, which enables web pages to be integrated into the social graph.
Application programming interface (API) was a prevalent segment of the workshop. An API is a set of protocols, tools, and routines used in building software applications; it facilitates interaction between software programs and serves as an interface between them.
Facebook API enables you to push growth and engagement on your website by producing a more personalized social experience.
“When students leave the workshop, I want them to build their own applications. Facebook is providing this free, so why not use it? It’s an open source. I want them to learn API because it gives them a different style of programming,” said Gulshan Kumar, workshop coordinator and final year IT student.
Sreevathsan Ravi, also a final year IT student at ASE, Coimbatore, gave a presentation on Sikuli, a software agent that lets users automate almost any task by using screenshots.
More precisely, it converts tasks to largely automatic operations and tests graphical user interfaces with Sikuli Script, a visual scripting API for Jython, and Sikuli IDE, an integrated development environment that facilitates visual script writing with screenshots.
“I would like students to gain updated knowledge of the technology. It’s a responsibility of an open source committee like us to create an awareness of the new scripting menus,” said Mr. Sreevathsan.
In addition to the aforementioned workshops, Anokha held seminars on ethical hacking, cloud computing, mobile robotics, computational fluid dynamics, and computer-aided chemical engineering design and modeling.
See Also
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