Reflections on Interning at Aura Semi

The Aura Auro Design team had interned in Bangalore for two weeks from the 2nd to the 14th of May at Aura Semi . The day started at 8:30 AM and we would leave after 7 PM. In these two weeks there was a lot of exposure for me in knowing how people worked as a team, and approached each other to clarify, and learn. The way things were organized and followed. The consistency and rigor in coding which would lead to a more efficient and understandable work was in-cooperated into mine, from observing and learning from the environment where I was. I had observed how as a team one can achieve way more than working in silos, getting others involved and having inputs greatly benefits in seeing things from various angles and aspects. That I had l less considered.

In these two weeks I have learn’t a lot about myself on how flexible I could be. Organizing and planning for the days ahead. Allocating time for various tasks and my work about in prioritizing them.

It was a good walk of 20 min everyday that I enjoyed with my colleagues on the way to office> We stayed as a PG, where we three (Arun, Bala, and I) had shared a room with two others. Was a new experience and a good one too  😉 .

Internship at Aura semiconductors, Bangalore

We spent two weeks as interns at Aura semiconductors, Bangalore. Staying, food and travel was taken care by Aura.

Things that I noticed differently:

I saw people working for a long time from 10 to 13 hours a day. They worked very focused and as teams. Problems were brought together and discussed between them. I noticed that they did not move to the next solution instead they stayed with the problem. People reviewed their work often.

What I learned:

This was a learning experience for me and I leaned a lot by simply noticing other people work. People had their own style of coding. I learned to think logically. This really helped me to move faster (than before) and I noticed that logical thinking helps a lot in coding. My four main learning are

1. Never hard code

2. Make the code as general as possible

3. Comment and give meaningful names to your variables so that it helps others understand what the line does. Even it helps my own self if I look at the code after some period of time.

4. Write down all the comments first before I start coding and have an idea of what the code should have. Write it in simple English.

In fact I learned lot more other stuffs.

What will I do differently:

I will interact more with my team and learn from each other.

Other cool stuffs of Bangalore:

There are lot of places where you can hang out. Living is too expensive. There are many job opportunities for graduates in Bangalore especially Engineers.

Stemland Guests

DSC_0860  DSC_0859DSC_0873DSC_0866Children from Govt school, Edayanchavadi visited us one day in April 2016. They interacted with Udavi children. Some of them showed them how to do the Rubiks cube. They were taught Abalone and other games. Some made the Bigshot cameras and some worked on a robot that was transferred into a guitar. Looked like they had good fun!

Bangalore Naatkal – May 2016

I spent two full weeks at Aura Semiconductor, Bangalore as an Intern. Most of the days we were in office from 8:30am to 7pm. These two weeks for me was more about learning and noticing how people at Aura work efficiently. Though I got some work done, the trip for me personally was about my growth and learning to work more in a professional way.

I noticed that everyone there work very well as a team. There is lots of team work involved. People talk to each other a lot. They sit with each other and clear their doubts. They maintain Revision control system. People checkout and checkin from that. They all had certain long time goals and plans which they wanted to achieve. People are very helpful at Aura. They seem to acknowledge each other very well too. Not all are always glued to the computer. They also take some time off having some coffee etc..

I learnt that whenever I am stuck with something and cant proceed further I should talk to others and ask for help. I should value other people’s time. I was adding comments to my code which I wasn’t doing before. I am learning to write code in a sensible manner and not add unwanted lines. I also learnt how powerful formulas can be once they are applied in a code.

The experience for me was very different spending nearly 11-12 hours day in office. Sometimes I missed Stemland and school during the day. But the days never felt that tiring when compared to Aura Auro. Maybe because of the AC, snacks, coffee and people staying late 🙂

Making a Model of a Generator

Along with the 6th graders in Udavi we had created a working model of a generator using a motor. The motor was connected to a pulley and routed to the cycle wheel. In turn when the wheel was rotated it produced electricity to power up the India map the students created with LED’s they also figured out that the LED’s did not glow in both direction of rotation of the wheel they found that there was tow terminals to the LED (Anode and Cathode) and it was different from normal bulbs. All the LED’s where connected in parallel to each other. with the generating power source in series.

link: https://youtu.be/DRLzvMe2RBE

Installation of standalone python34

STEP1:

Download python34 (python3.4.0 msi)  from following website,
https://www.python.org/downloads/release/python-340/
After you have installed it go to command terminal(cmd) and put this python in your path as first priority
PATH=C:\Python34;C:\Python34\Scripts;%PATH%     (or)
Go to Control Panel -> System and Security -> System ->  Advanced system settings -> environment variables -> system variables -> path and paste C:\Python34;C:\Python34\Scripts;

STEP2:

Download PySide-1.2.4-cp34-none-win32.whl from https://pypi.python.org/pypi/PySide/1.2.4
In the cmd, cd into the directory where PySide-1.2.4-cp34-none-win32.whl is present and run,
pip install PySide-1.2.4-cp34-none-win32.whl

STEP3:

Download spyder2.3 from https://pypi.python.org/pypi/spyder/2.3.0
In the cmd,
cd spyder-2.3.0
python setup.py install
should install your spyder in the python setup.

STEP4:

Download pyinstaller from https://pypi.python.org/pypi/pypiwin32/219
in the cmd,
pip install pypiwin32-219-cp34-none-win32.whl

STEP5:

Download pyinstaller from https://github.com/pyinstaller/pyinstaller/releases
In the cmd,
cd PyInstaller-3.1.1
python setup.py install

STEP6:

Download xlrd package from  https://pypi.python.org/pypi/xlrd/0.9.3
In the cmd,
cd xlrd-0.9.4
python setup.py install

STEP7:

Download pyglet package from https://pypi.python.org/pypi/pyglet/1.2.3
In the cmd,
pip install pyglet-1.2.3-py3-none-any.whl

STEP8:

Download psutil( download exe since .whl file didn’t work ) from https://pypi.python.org/pypi/psutil 
and run it.
Note:
If you encounter an error saying,
return psutil.phymem_usage().percent AttributeError: ‘module’ object has no attribute ‘phymem_usage’
Open the system.py file:
C:\Python34\Lib\site-packages\spyderlib\utils\system.py
In that file, replace return psutil.phymem_usage().percent line with
return psutil.virtual_memory().percent

StemLand-Name Board

At first the children did a seven segment display(SSD) board which displays StemLand on it by lighting it up using a 9V battery using a corresponding resistor in series. After that we(Anishvathi,Sangeetha,Praveen,Sharmila,Fevina- 8th Grade Students) properly soldered the SSD on a pcb board . We wanted to make the ssd to light up in various ways. So, we used an arduino pro-mini to program the SSD to blink in various ways .We used a battery which was 9V but if we had given the 9V directly it would burn out the arduino board and the SSD.So, we used a 5V voltage regulator which will give us 5V at the output from a 9V input from the battery. Where the output of the regulator is fed to the input of the arduino board. The board worked smoothly. After a few days the battery discharged so we had to change a new battery .

Then Sanjeev gave an idea to make it work using the solar panel . At first Praveen (Student form 8th Grade) and I used one solar panel which did not have enough current to light up the SSDs.So, we used two solar panels in parallel and we got enough current to light up the SSD. Now the board runs in solar energy from the solar panel.

DSC_0708

DSC_0715(Praveen holding the solar panel and displaying how it works)

There is also more detail about this Name Board in the link below

http://www.auraauro.com/showcase/name-board-of-stem-land/

 

Syringe Generator

The syringe generator from Arvind Gupta’s Toys was made by few students in the 6th grade. They got the required materials; syringe, enamel wire, Neodymium magnets, and a LED. The children saw the video and came up with their own syringe generator. They also noticed that the led only blinks when the magnet hits one end of the syringe every time they shook it.

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