I stared at the silver orb dreaming to own it. But for a 2nd Year B.Tech student, the price was staggering. I cursed Shashank for showing it to me the day before because since then I could think of nothing else. The silver orb, a replacement to my Philips Walkman. I wondered how many people round the globe were viewing this page and eagerly clicking on "Add to cart" endangering one of Sony's pioneering invention. Digital mp3 players were soon going to rule the music world. But two thousand eight hundred rupees....
"..techfest cash price 15000... Mumbai... Line follower.... Micro mouse..." I over heard the seniors sitting beside me in the departmant browsing center. I opened the IIT, Powai techfest site. Most of the competitions involved making robots or creating web sites or presenting papers, cash prices were highly attractive ranging from Rs5000 to Rs20000, but none interested me. Suddenly I saw the title "CRO 1.0", intrigued I clicked on it.
"Create a dot-dash game to be played on a CRO using 8051 microcontroller. It should be a 1-Player game with a Human player playing aganist the computer"
Microcontroller was a black box to me and a CRO, well with all the dials and knobs, was a nightmare. We often ended up turning random knobs and toggling random buttons to get some output during lab sessions. But I knew this was the competition I ought to register for and immediately signed up.
First learn 8051 then CRO, I decided.
After a week of ardous study in the library about the 8051, I went shopping and bought the microcontroller, its programmer, soldering iron, solder wire, resistors, capisitors, clock crystal, batteries and other odds and ends spendng Rs2000. In a week, after burning a few micontrollers and messing around with soldering, I could design a circuit and write code to blink an LED. Next, the CRO, an hour of online lessons and I knew the purpose of every dial and button. I started showing off in the lab too. Our HOD, a thin lean man, flatly refused me a CRO after lab hours but I wrenched it out from higher authorities without his knowledge. It offended him but I didnt care, he was a snob anyway.
So there I was after class hours in the lab with a mess of wires, a CRO beside the monitor, the monitor filled with lines of assembly code, circuits and batteries all around me and a small keypad in my hand with which I was moving a dot on the CRO, the lab technicians were highly amused and told me they have never seen anything like this in the lab before. This apparatus earned me friendship and respect from every technician in the lab for the rest of my stay in the college. But the HOD, well the snob just started ignoring me. Well anyway, it is common knowledge that in India, lab technicians are often more knowledgeable and useful than many PhD profs!
I was sitting staring at the CRO filled with dots and a few dashes; I was playing aganist the microcontroller. I had to start to Mumbai the next day. The game was ready, except for one small bug, it was behaving erratically at times. I went over the whole assembly code, line by line, at least 10 times, everything seemed perfect. I had the scribbled memory map in front of me. There was no operating system and I had to carefully manage the usage of every byte in the 128byte RAM.
"Wish I had more time", I shouted aloud.
Everyday, I had access to the CRO only for five hours, from 5pm to 10pm, a big handicap!
"Lab will close in half an hour", shouted the assistant, I raised my hand in acknowledgement and started going over the memory map.
"Oh my god!", I exclaimed after 15 minutes of examining. One byte in the memory was having two addresses and I was happily using it as two bytes corrupting it and hence the erratic behaviour!
I furiously made changes to the code and finished when just five minutes were left, the assistant was turning off the lights. Quickly, I compiled and burned the program into the controller and started tesing it.
"Dad, I am going tomorrow", I called up and told dad half an hour later. Reliance has just introduced the Reliance to Reliance anywhere in India free offer and we spoke for about half an hour. In the end, Dad decided to accompany me to Mumbai. I didn't know whether to laugh or cry; on one hand, it would be nice to show him what I had made but on the other had, techfest in Mumbai, the crowd was going to be colourful ;).
The IIT lab was dazzling, it was state-of-art. If you had seen Iron Man, it was like I was Tony Stark working in the Afghan Caves while the IIT Teams were Tony Stark working in his own futuristic lab! But a few of them were still struggling. In contrast to my simple circuit, some had a briefcase filled with ICs. I thought I stood no chance and just decided to enjoy the fest.
"The third prize goes to Jayanth from sastra. He is the youngest participant and did it all by himself", announced the judge. I was stunned. The allowed team size was four but I work alone. I had all my things packed, ready to leave after applauding the winners. Visitors who had played my game came forwarded to congratulate me while I was still in daze.
The cash prize was Rs3000 with which I got my first mp3 player. The irony was, I spent around Rs5000 in developing the apparatus but I guess it was fair to ask Dad the money to buy educational stuff and spend the winnings on entertainment :-)
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