“Sita Sings the Blues” is an animated feature (72 minutes) based on Sita’s adventures in the ancient Indian epic the Ramayana.

Visit Sita Sings the Blues for more info.

This is a cool collection of animated movies released under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike License .

I had a look at the website. Wow superb design. Cool animation. There are cool still images in the front page it self. I loved it. Have a look at those pages….

“Sita Sings the Blues” is the work done by Nina Paley.

You don’t need my permission to copy, share, publish, archive, show, sell, broadcast, or remix _Sita Sings the Blues. Conventional wisdom urges me to demand payment for every use of the film, but then how would people without money get to see it? How widely would the film be disseminated if it were limited by permission and fees? Control offers a false sense of security. The only real security I have is trusting you, trusting culture, and trusting freedom.     –from_ Sita Sings the Blues by Nina Paley.

There is also a faq page http://www.ninapaley.com/Sitayana/FAQ.html

Also a dedicated wiki http://sitasingstheblues.com/wiki

Read the interview with Nina Paley How Copyright Restrictions Suppress Art: An Interview With Nina Paley About “Sita Sings The Blues”

You can download the videos from http://sitasingstheblues.com/wiki/index.php?title=SitaSites

See a whole lot of stills from http://www.sitasingstheblues.com/stills.html

This link for video has been taken from http://www.boingboing.net/2009/02/23/sita-sings-the-blues.html

Soldering  is one of the essential skill required for an electronics hobbyist. These days I was searching for some cool soldering tutorials. And the result was my favourite site  INSTRUCTABLES .

You can check this link http://www.instructables.com/id/Soldering/ for a whole lot of soldering tutorials with some of them having videos.

The other web page I found was http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/tutorials.php?tc=2 . Spark Fun is an amazing website. This website has all its circuit open. You can find a whole lot of tutorials and other thing about electronics from its page.

These kind of soldering skills are essential for hacking devices.

From my experience in soldering 50% of soldering skill is obtained by practice. But the remaining 50% skills can be improved only if you have good tools for soldering. At least have an micro soldering iron with you for doing SMD soldering.

HAPPY SOLDERING….

Octave is a kind of FREE SOFTWARE  replacement to matlab. But still these days matlab is being used by colleges for their lab purposes.

Even my B-Tech syllabus of calicut university has matlab to be learned. So I thought of  moving towards octave. These are some cool links to start with OCTAVE. You must have installed octave in your PC for using this.

http://www.gnu.org/software/octave/docs.html

http://www.aims.ac.za/resources/tutorials/octave/

http://homepages.nyu.edu/~kpl2/dsts6/octaveTutorial.html

http://www-mdp.eng.cam.ac.uk/web/CD/engapps/octave/octavetut.pdf

These tutorials are not written by me. But I am planning to write one. It will contain some basic commands and also the experiments solved for the B-Tech Electronics and Communication Engineering.

Octave Introduction

Experiments using Octave for B-Tech course

Soon this page will be running up. Now I am going for my final year tour to Hyderabad (INDIA) .After that the tutorials will be setup…

You can just see a small experiment implemented by my friend using octave.

http://kishoreathrasseri.wordpress.com/2009/02/14/dsp-lab-week-1/

Brief report on the talk conducted at Government Polytechnique college, Chelakara

Yesterday (19-02-2009) Krishnan Unni and I went to conduct a talk on Free Software, Python Programming and Open Hardware. These talk’s were conducted as the request from students of poly technique.

I and unni reached the college almost at 10.00 AM. There was a small inaugural session. After that we were asked to start the talk . The morning session was on Free Software Philosophy, GNU/Linux installation steps and general GNU/Linux doubts. this was handled by Unni.

All the students were eagerly hearing the talk. There was a very good response from the  students. And the important thing is that all the students were very interactive. Questions were coming from all sides on general GNU/Linux tools, virus removal methods, installing games, accessing internet….. This session had an end at 12.30 PM.

The afternoon session was split into two, the python programming and the other was Open hardware. Python Programming was handled by unni. There was a small programming contest on python. He also showed how to develop software’s using python.

My topic was Open Hardware. Actually what I had in mind was introducing what is open hardware, common electronic designing tools and programming the AVR microcontrollers using GNU/Linux. But everything changed after seeing their syllabus.These guys had to  study about ATmega128 and also about ARM processors. I was shocked seeing it. Even the calicut university Electronics Engineering syllabus didn’t have these latest topics. I introduced about open hardware. But programming the AVR microcontrollers was not that much nice. There was a parallel port failure and the other fact was that the students knew how to program all these . What I showed was LED blinking. But they had studied blinking LED’s in their 6th semester itself. Anyway I could have made it more fun if  I knew about the syllabus by adding some superb videos like Big Buck Bunny

Now I am in a shame to say that I am learning Electronics engineering because a lower course like the diploma had a lot more to study than engineering course…. these students were more practical.

Anyway the response form the students were fantastic. Thanks to Yamini Madam and all the computer science students of chelakara.

One of the cool device designed by Jay Silver of MIT is DRAWDIO.  Drawdio is a pencil that can make sound. Don’t be surprised. In short drawdio is a pencil that lets you draw music.

See this page http://web.media.mit.edu/~silver/drawdio/play.htm

I decided to build that pencil. I collected documents from Ladyada’s Drawdio page. The TLC 551 IC was not available in the electronics market in THRISSUR. Actually TLC 551 is a low voltage version of LM 555. So I decided to replace TLC 551 with LM 555.

After building the circuit, I fed it with 5V supply. Since it was LM 555 I fed 5V. If it were TLC 551 we can use a AAA battery to power the circuit.

But the transistor started to heat up. I think that the transistor (amplifier) circuit was designed to be powered from AAA battery. So the 5V might have made it to heat up.

There comes my hack. It’s not actually a hack. I found that we can easily replace the amplifier circuit and the speaker with a buzzer. I have redrawn the circuit with the buzzer. You can download the modified circuit.

drawdio.sch

drawdio.pdf

This circuit succeeded for a 5V powered LM 555 circuit. But I don’t think it will work if you use a AAA battery to power the circuit and also replacing the LM 555 with TLC 551. If the circuit is powered by a AAA battery, the buzzer wont produce sound that is much audible. so in that case you will have to use the amplifier and the speaker circuit.

These are the two snapshots that has been modified from

http://web.media.mit.edu/~silver/drawdio/make.htm

Use this snaps together with the circuit diagram to build the DRAWDIO. See these snaps. These are test run done by me on the breadboard.

HAPPY DRAWING…..