Ashok Jhunjhunwala

This paper illustrates the Battery Life Cycle Tester with intelligent charging and discharging unit comprising of measurement, data logging, remote monitoring and communication sections for data acquisition and control. The life cycle tester switches between different charging and discharging modes making it compatible with all battery chemistries. The discharger comprises of an electronic load using MOSFETs operated in their linear region to dissipate power. The required charging/discharging profiles for various applications like electric vehicle motor load and urban drive cycle tests can be programmed via an RS485 link and the data collection is done through Ethernet with an onboard SD card for backup. The user can also set their own test profiles within given limits. The Battery Life Cycle tester is used to perform required charging and discharging profiles at the specified Depth of Discharge (DOD), temperature, State of charge (SOC), charge and discharge rates for the desired number of cycles and store the data for analysis.

This paper describes and discusses the setting up of a DSP Cloud Lab, a setup to execute programs remotely. The programs can be executed on a variety of DSP boards; they could be microprocessor assembly language programs or programs written in assembly language requiring powerful DSP boards or even DSP boards with an FPGA accelerator. The boards used are based on Blackfin Architecture. For a student / developer who writes codes and tests on it, it appears as if they have exclusive use of the boards. However, the boards are highly shared, enabling a large number of students / developers to use them simultaneously. This paper also discusses the design choices made at different stages and the extent to which it facilitates or restricts the use of the DSP boards for a developer. © 2013 IEEE.

In this paper, we discuss efficient implementation of machine learning algorithms on DSPs. Specifically, we implement OCR and speech recognition on DSP and show how they can be optimized using fixed point routines. We illustrate the optimal usage of DSP resources like MAC units, shifters and software pipelining through assembly code structuring which massively reduces the MIPS consumed by the processor. We also describe how floating point overheads can be reduced by equivalent fixed point routines for real time implementations. Though the Blackfin-533 DSP is chosen for this illustration, the ideas presented here apply to other fixed point DSPs as well.

A desert cooler typically is a blower fan that sucks air through a moistened surface to achieve a drop in inlet air temperature. A pump is used to circulate water from a lower tank to the evaporative pads working with a swing louver motor for directing the air automatically. The power consumption of the evaporative air cooler is primarily in single phase induction motor (SPIM) used for fan motor [1, 2]. To lower this power consumption, a brushless DC machine and its circuitry were designed and used. This is powered also by PV panel and batteries. The power consumption comparative study was carried out on SPIM and BLDC machines at three speeds. The outcome of the study shows 39.3% of power saved on with BLDC machine air coolers.

As the current world moves towards e-learning, this paper discusses about a recently developed remote Digital Signal Processing lab at IIT Madras. This lab enables the students to use Blackfin 537 based DSP kits to perform their real-time experiments / projects over the Internet. The DSP boards are custom made, with uClinux ported onto them, to facilitate a multi-user environment. This paper delineates the motivation, hardware setup, software setup and remote user access for using the laboratry. Finally the performance, scope and scalability are discussed with emperical data. © 2012 IEEE.

Considerable efforts over the last decade to provide Internet connectivity in rural India have yielded poor results. However, the success of mobile telephony in rural India in recent years offers hope. © 2006 IEEE.

As the Leisang village in Manipur received electricity in April 2018, the prime minister of India announced that every Indian village is now electrified. A village is considered electrified in India when 10% of its homes receive electricity. However, the number of village homes that have electricity has now reached 84%, with some 41 million households still without power. This village-electrification program has been going on for many years. Until a few years back, there was a large shortage of power with power demand exceeding supply, leading to no/a weak push to extend the grid to the village. Over the last few years, when more coal power plants became operational, the supply strengthened. At the same time, the energy costs for the solar and wind powerattained grid parity, enabling the addition of significant renewable power. Simultaneously, the power grid was strengthened, and India attained a single national grid on 31 December 2013, such that power generated in surplus areas could be transported to deficit regions. All of this helped in surplus power generation because the demand did not pick up much in recent years. The social obligation to extend the electric grid to each village and then to at least 10% of its homes no longer had a fundamental bottleneck. The target-driven approach of the prime minister?s office helped to expedite the effort.

While Indian agriculture contributes merely 13.9% of the country's Gross Domestic Product, nearly 52% of the population still depends on agriculture for its livelihood. Close to half of the farmers are small farmers (owning 1.0 ha or less) facing near-stagnant productivity. This is due to several factors, but farmers often indicate that access to the right information at the right time is one of the most sought after need. Addressing this need to aid in the development of a productive and sustainable agricultural sector has certainly emerged as one of the major humanitarian challenges in India. There have been numerous efforts in this direction with the setting up of agricultural advisory systems, to provide information to farmers, but not many have succeeded in the objective of providing easily accessible, sustainable, personalized advisories to farmers. Recognizing this, the Indo-UK Advanced Technology Centre of Excellence in Next Generation Networks, Systems and Services (IUATC), a major technology transfer initiative, supported by the Department of Science and Technology (DST) in India and UK Government under the Digital Economy Theme is attempting to address the challenges in Indian agriculture through Information and Communication Technology (ICT) networks. This paper presents a functioning Agricultural Advisory System that has been built with the aim of bridging information gaps between farmers and agriculture knowledge workers (such as agricultural scientists and extension workers) and is an extension of a technology effort that has been previously presented. While our earlier work only discussed the potential of using an innovative ICT approach to providing personalized agricultural advisories, this paper covers details of the technology implementation, presents a brief summary of the impact analysis carried out with the farmers registered into our system and discusses new features that could make the system more effective.

The limitations of the conventional MPPT technique are oscillations of the system at steady state leading to energy loss, slower response and the occurrence of drift. A simple zonal based MPPT controller is proposed in this paper which addresses the above limitations without additional requirement of sampling or sensors apart from the basic voltage and current sensors. The proposed system is simple, cost effective and easy to implement. Phase shift reference (Duty) for the DC-DC converter is varied dynamically by the proposed MPPT controller depending upon the operating point voltage to have a better dynamic response. The error in the perturbation direction, if any, is corrected by the controller while computing the change in duty reference ΔD). This ensures the drift free operation. The response speed of the proposed controller is improved compared to the conventional controller by having a variable step size. Solar PV fed full bridge series resonance DC-DC converter with resistive load is considered for evaluating the proposed control scheme. The performance of the proposed MPPT control technique is verified by simulations and hardware results.

The literature on Smart Cities has not as yet paid adequate attention to the rural sector, and the potential in villages for creating smart and sustainable solutions for the 21st century. This paper focuses on linking proposed smart city strategies to smart village policies to ensure that rural youth have improved opportunities for employment through ICT initiatives to ensure digital inclusion, using primary surveys undertaken in India. The motivation was to understand how mobile telephony could be a catalyst to create Smart Villages in India, where young people can chart out new pathways to realize their aspirations with regard to tertiary education and new avenues for diversifying into rural non-agricultural employment. We use data obtained from a household survey in villages in the states of Punjab and Tamil Nadu to examine the mobile phone usage preferences of rural educated youth to identify the way forward in improving the accessibility of services on the supply side. We make the case that where youth are using mobile phone access to increase their social information base it is indeed possible that the new social media groups formed by rural youth become a powerful conduit for generating new employment opportunities. The key to accessing this solution is to use a demand driven model for mobile services that would permit a bottom of governance model to generate sustainable growth of enterprises and improved human development of these villages.