Hardware Competition at ProCom2010

And so the coverage continues of ProCom 2010 with featured hardware projects.

Faraz Hamied, Syed Ali Irshad, Shariq Abbas, Imad Bin Jamal are Final Year students from NED who have developed a project called ‘Street Power’. The students explain, “The project intends to make the street lights independent on conventional KESC electricity. If we can achieve that, a lot of electricity can be saved for the household purposes.”

Here’s how the project works: as a pre-requisite, the project needs to be submerged underground with only the plunger slightly above the surface. When the car runs on the road and presses the plunger as it steps over on the run, the pushing plunger generates mechanical power that gets saved as charge in the built-in battery of the system. In this way, electric charge continues to store and consolidate in the system’s battery, throughout the daytime, as each cars passes by. This heap of stored charge can be used to light the street lights once the sun is down, comprehensively.

The system equipment cost the team Rs. 3000, but if the raw materials are purchased in bulk for manufacturing on a high scale, the cost can probably go down to Rs. 1000.

NED 2nd year students Shahzad Saleem, Ahsan Saeed and Adeel Amin have developed the ‘Embedded Video Processing Using FPGA’. “We’ve designed a machine vision robot which is capable of tracking a selected target on the basis of its visual properties. We have equipped our robot to mimic the human eye in terms of vision i.e. it has capability of estimating the position as well as depth of an object and this information is used to identify and follow an object.”

“We’d like to tell you that we’ve been selected in the top ten projects from 16 muslim countries in the National Instruments Mine Detection Robot Design Contest. The contest is a joint venture of UN and National Instruments to help Lebanon develop its defense system. The final will take place in the mines of Lebanon.”

3rd year students Ammad Shafique, Syed Uzair Asim, Rana Waqar, Minhaj Nasir and Ghulam Abbas from SUPARCO Institute of Technical Training have developed the ‘Unmanned Aerial Vehicle’. “To be precise, we’ve made a UAV (Un-Armed Aerial Vehicle) of the class VTOL (Vertical Takeoff and Landing) which has the tendency to take off as well as land, without a runway.

As far as production is concerned, the students explain that a French company, MicroCopter, produces it especially for the US Army, as an ally. It’s used for spying as well as law and order situation handling.

“On similar lines, we’ve also offered our project to CDGK, for rendering its services in the fields of traffic monitoring, street crime monitoring, for runtime monitoring in places where fire breaks out, before sending the fire fighter up there in actual. It cost us Rs.25000 in the making.”

More updates on their way! Farrukh Zafar Signing off..