Sunday Times..!

I have a little routine on Sunday's which is my early morning trip (or pilgrimage!) to Lalbagh, the best and the biggest park in Bangalore. And its just about a 5 min ride from my home!

Now if you have never visited Lalbagh before, let me describe it a little.

Lalbagh is quite a vast expansive park in the heart of Bangalore. With entry gates in all four directions, east, west north and south (and maybe a few more), they all lead to a central 'Greenhouse', a glass/plastic structure. Around it, the park spreads its green wings of trees, flowers and lawns. As you stand there, you can see nothing of the outside of the park but only pristine greenery of beautifully manicured lawns, rose gardens and nurseries, stretching from one end to the other. A very large lake is snuggled in another area of the park. You can walk around the lake on a narrow but well made and lovely walkaway and enjoy the slightly heavy but breezy winds from the beautiful water body. Many birds inhabit the lake and you can easily spot ducks and long-billed birds.

When you walk around the lake, the road leads to one of two exit points of the park, or, you can turn around, and walk right back into the park itself (I would choose the latter!). As you walk around, you would find a Japanese garden, rose garden, bonsai garden and so many others. There is one with its bushes cut into the shapes of animals like rabbits, elephants, camels and horses! All these are spread across the park. There are many free open spaces too. Large lawns where you can just rest under casurina or banyan trees and watch the scurrying squirrels or the cooing birds! In either case, its a most enjoyable and relaxing experience.

There used to be an aquarium (the building still exists), but its not operational anymore (but I have been lucky to see it when it used to be there). There is a large clock dial too, made on a slight incline with many fairy-tale plastic characters surrounding it. Something which kids enjoy a lot! And everywhere you can find wooden benches, as you would most definitely take sometime to absorb the beauty of Lalbagh!

I normally jog around the park on Sunday's, sometimes covering the lake area too. In the company of nature. I rate it as one of my best moments of the week, something that I look forward to every week.

Connecting back to nature gives a sense of quiet and calm, away from the the hum-drum and noisy world!

Or to quote Hardy, "Far from the madding crowd..!"

Have a great weekend!

TI MCU's

Its been awfully long since I posted. Just been lazy and unable to get into the groove! I have been fighting robots that were on the verge of taking over the world and now I know a thing or two about controlling them...woops, bonkers! Time to move on...

Last week I attended the Texas Instruments MCU Deep Dive workshop and had a hands-on sessions experimenting with the MSP430 ultra-low-power MCU. The dev board was called the 'LaunchPad' and the TI folks had put together this 2-day workshop on not only MSP430 but also C2000, Stellaris and Hercules MCU's.

These were all new MCUs to me as I was only aware of Microchip and Atmel families till now. TI MCUs was new, though they have been around for decades (just shows how out-dated I was!) I checked out the use-cases for these online and then decided to take up the MSP430 track because I found quite a few hobbyists using it and the use-cases were something which I could experiment with in my free time.

After getting familiarized with Code Composer Studio and doing a few led-blinky exercises with the Launchpad development board, we went over in detail with the in-built timers, UARTs, temperature sensors and ADCs (which did not work for me :( ). It was great getting to learn something hands-on and experimenting as soon as the theory was done with. And its been a long time since I worked on MCUs again!

This was a one-of-a-kind event which I havent seen happening before. There were almost a 100 ppl in the MSP430 track, comprising mostly of embedded folks and a few students too.

Anyway, in the coming months I will be experimenting with the Launchpad board plus use the AVR MCU that I already have. Will try and build something from it ;) more on that later...

Hasta-la-vista!