In these Hardware Labs are Forged an Empire of the Mind

Bengaluru

Twenty-three-year old Arun Magesh is a regular startup employee like many folks in Bengaluru. But what sets him apart from are the “mind-controlled electronics“ that he builds by night. His device, which is mounted on the head, can learn a person’s thinking patterns over time, and subsequently control prosthetics or any device which has a computing unit.“With this device, I can even tell how happy you are,“ said Magesh, a graduate of Arunai College of Engineering in Thiruvannamalai.He has also developed products such as an epilepsy detection box and a driver sleep detector. As the maker movement gains pace in India, startups and individ uals alike are bringing hardware into fields as diverse as genetic en gineering, cocktail making and neuroscience to create meaning ful, long-term projects that push the boundary of innovation be yond what exists today.

For instance, at the Srishti School of Art & Design, designers have been sitting with biologists over the last year to create low-cost sci entific instruments -a micro scope made out of a webcam, an in cubator to cultivate bacteria, a 3D printer to print organic material, among others.

“This subject is cloaked in some . kind of mysticism to the outside world. But, in fact, it is all the stuff that you can understand,“ said Yashas Shetty, who has been work ing with Srishti for the past decade.

On the other hand, Barsys is a cocktail-dispensing machine developed by six students of Manipal Institute of Technology, which is preloaded with 1,000 recipes.

“A world record for making 500 cocktails with three recipes is 2 hours 18 minutes and 9 seconds.Our machine does it in less than half that time,“ said Vulcantronics’ Founder and Chief Executive Officer Akshet Tewari, who plans to sell the product in the next three months to both individuals and bars & restaurants at roughly Rs 120,000. There’s also MyProbus, a selfie-remote, battery charger, a pen drive and a tracking device, all rolled into one. Founded in 2012, MyProbus is no bigger than a coin and has been manufactured completely in India. “The aim was to free oneself from the clutter of existing devices around you,“ said Anand Singh, 27year-old former employee of 3M India. All these innovations, interestingly, are coming out of regular colleges that have zero affiliations with the high-profile IITs. To encourage inventions, a mini-revolution is afoot across these colleges to equip students with the right tinkering kit. Over the last two years, ADORMI has sold nearly 4,000 build-it-yourself electronic products to colleges across India, helping kids move beyond theory within books.

Whether they will become mass market products is too early to tell.Shetty of Srishti says all projects were done with an academic pursuit and that commercialisation was not their priority.

 Source: The Economic Times