The robotics and automation club of SPIT, namely SPrac, held a successful workshop about the basics of a Bluetooth-based robot as the month of September commenced. On 1st and 2nd September excited first year students made their way to S.P.I.T to update their skillset.
Saturday’s session started at 10 A.M. in BE-ETRX .A total of seventy-six students were present for the workshop, mostly from the branch of Electronics and EXTC. The FEs were curious and expectant as it was the committee’s first event venture of the academic year. The workshop was led by the members of SPrac and lectured the attentive students on topics such as the code and the basic bot building techniques. The electronic aspects were handled by Suumedh Kalnawat and Amit Kumar from SE-Electronics and TE-Electronics respectively. While the coding aspects were helmed by Sameep Pote from SE-ETRX and Gopala Dhar TE Electronics. Ruchi Gupte from SE-EXTC and Tejveer Singh from TE ELectronics taught the students how the mechanical elements of the bot work while Harit Bandi from SE-EXTC managed the event efficiently.
The team started with a basic introduction to simple robotics and the working of the bot. Presentations were used to teach in the seminar and a large chunk of the day was consumed in teaching prime aspects of the bot. LED-glowing mechanisms were learned by the students and a day which had the bot schedule a regular 10-second delay LED on-and-off sequence. The day ended for them at 5 p.m.
The next day started at the same time at 10 A.M. but was stretched to 7 in the evening. The participants were instructed to bring laptops for ease of performance during the main process of bot-building and also to download two apps of which one was custom made by SPrac. The committee had to change the venue to room. Sameep explained the code which was written in Arduino’s IDE and defined the characteristic movements and orientations of the Bluetooth controlled bot, which included the glowing of LEDs, the motor driving initiations and speed and fundamental movement. The Sunday’s goal also included the controlling of LED brightness. The students implemented the same with the kits provided to each of the groups and started to prepare their bots. The kit included an Arduino Uno, motor drivers, and motors, the chassis and bus wires.
All the bots were alive and kicking and spurring by the afternoon and troubleshooting was overseen by the mentors. Basic technical problems like motor speed, LED flickering and mismatched wiring and mechanical faults were handled masterfully by the SPrac members. The apps governed the Bluetooth controlling of the bot and helped with the ease of functioning. The hard-working groups were provided with Samosas and Frooti as refreshments and were given frequent breaks over the course of the workshop.
Manav Jain, a student from SE-ETRX quoted“The event was a good trip down the memory lane as I had attended the workshop when I was in the first year. A good, student-friendly workshop is hard to come by in the case of robotics and automation. It was a ‘paisa-vasool’ workshop.” 
“It was fun to work with so many groups and each a different one than the other. Time flew and I never kept track of it as I was immersed in monitoring the event. We plan to host even more events in the coming months with much more interesting concepts. We hope we get even more responses, fingers crossed!”Suumedh Kalnawat, organizer.
– Pratik Mane