thatengineerguy

My interest in Electronics and wireless communication was first piqued when I received a remote-controlled car for my birthday. After a month of playing with it, I decided to take it apart to see how it worked. My first thought after opening it up and looking at the circuit board was,” This is beautiful, I have to learn how to make something like this”. That was my introduction into the world of Electronics. I then made my decision to choose the subjects in school that would take me in the direction of becoming an electronics engineer. This led me to choose Electronics and Communication as my major in Sathyabama University. My first experience in working with microcontroller was with an Arduino MEGA 2560 R3 with which I first started developing projects which were published online, and then started to make my own changes to them, which made them perform different actions. Working with Arduino introduced me to hardware coding with C++. C++, a language which I was already proficient in thanks to a two-year course that I had taken in high school, was now much more useful to me as a development tool, and using it to tweak my Arduino projects was one of the highlights of my college experience. I’ve always believed that development of any product should be towards making life easier. With this thought, I decided to develop a product that could be used for checking bpm and temperature and most importantly, to be portable. The components were an Atmel Micro-controller, a zigbee module for communication and the sensors for detecting bpm and body temperature. I had originally envisioned this device to be unobtrusive like a fitness tracking device. But, on researching the sensors required to give an accurate reading of the temperature and bpm, it turned out that only in-ear temperature sensors are close to giving an accurate reading, so the final product was a device that could read and display the body parameters, but did not meet the portability standard that I had set for myself. Working on this project to make it better is one of my goals in applying for the Analog and Mixed Signal track because the research center is the best place that I can gain the knowledge to fully realise my vision of the product. After graduating, I decided to take a year off to travel and explore different options on what I wanted to do with my life, because I didn’t want to make a hasty decision and regret it later. This wasn’t a popular decision, as most people assumed that I would be doing absolutely nothing in that time, but the experiences that I’ve gained in the year have given me a perspective on life which most of my peers don’t have. I also did work on a project for a company that involved creating a network between ships that could be set up whenever two or more ships were within a certain range of each other. Unfortunately, the project did not go into the development as the company that it was for, rejected the proof of concept, but the research that I had done for the project got me interested in the applications of transceivers. My intended area of specialization in the graduate program of Electrical and Electronics Engineering at TAMU University will be in Analog and Mixed Signals which includes courses like VLSI circuit design, Solid State Devices, Integrated CMOS RF circuits and systems etcetera and projects like Design of an RFID/ZIGBEE network for blind navigation and Development of built-in testing for Analog and RF integrated Circuits are fascinating. The possibility of working under eminent professors Jose Silva-Martinez, Kamran Entessari is one of my reasons to apply to this University. Augmenting my case, the course content of the Graduate program makes me feel that the course is tailor-made to suit my interests and hence, I look forward to joining the elite club of researchers at the department.