Raghav

Introduction

I am currently in my final year of the BEng Electrical Engineering program at BCIT. As part of the program, final-year students complete an industry-sponsored capstone project, where we collaborate with real companies to solve real engineering problems. It is an opportunity to apply everything we have learned over the past four years to meaningful problems beyond the classroom.

Prelude

I am now a senior year (electrical) engineering student at BCIT. Most of my time this year is being consumed by an industry-sponsored capstone project. Hence, when it came time to choose a project for ELEX 7820: Real-Time Embedded Systems, I was very aware of my own bandwidth.

If you have been following my posts, you know I am currently enrolled in the BEng Electrical Engineering program at BCIT, now in my third year (Level 6). This semester, I took ELEX 7660 – Digital System Design, a course that dives into hardware description languages (HDLs) (SystemVerilog), finite state machines (FSMs), the principles of digital system design, etc.

How It All Began

Growing up with the Internet, I had always wanted to have my own website. So, I purchased this domain as soon as I earned my first bit of money. A core memory from my childhood is when I visited this domain—back then, it was owned by another person with the same first and last name as me, and they were a known personality in India. You can still go to the Internet Archive and find a good old Web 2.0 website from sometime in the mid to late 2000s. At some point, they must have given up on this domain because I purchased it in late 2016. At that time, my goal was simply to park the domain with a landing page and spend as little as possible on hosting.

In the BEng EE program at BCIT we have two 4-week summer terms. One of them is taken right after the first year and the second one can be taken after the completion of the second or third year. I recently completed that second 4-week term, and one of the courses I took was ELEX 4699 – Electronics System Design Project. The goal was to create a robot rover that navigates an arena, and shoots targets while minimizing completion time. The arena, functioning as a server, sends data to connected client robots. Clients use a Raspberry Pi as the host controller, and a PiCam with OpenCV for image recognition.

If you have been following my posts, you would know I am an Electrical Engineering student at BCIT. In my last post, I talked about my course ELEX 4618 (Object Oriented Program Design), and some of the weekly labs I worked on. One of those labs (#8) required us to make a colored ball sorter. It had to be programmed in C++ to run on a Raspberry Pi that uses PiCam and OpenCV to detect colors and the pigpio library to enable us to use the Pi GPIO pins to interact with other hardware. In Lab #9, we added functionality so this device can be controlled and sends a video stream over the network.