My Experiences with Truth : Part 1

After working for more than 3 years in India in the field of VLSI, I returned to Nepal with high hopes of starting something big. Its not that I had expected my entrepreneurial trip to be a smooth ride, but there were many aspects of the trip that I had never considered, which in fact haunted me during the ride. The journey is on hold at the moment.

My experiences with Truth is my findings and learning on this journey.

When I returned to Nepal, I had two paths to walk onto. I could either start something on the internet, like the e-commerce sites or something to do with industrial automation (using robotics) / peripheral electronics products (like printers, scanners, etc).

Both the paths had their share of goodies and baddies. Doing something on the internet meant I would be stepping into a new territory, but if you view from the investment side, it wasn't going to need a lot of investment. If you look at the electronics product manufacturing venture, it would require lots of investment and more importantly - skilled manpower. But on the flip-side, it would mean that I would be doing something that I have always loved.

And what did I choose? The easy path (at least at the beginning), i.e. building an e-commerce site.

Myself and a friend had this wonderful concept of an internet mall, giving spaces to brick-and-mortar shops and let them sell their stuff in the internet. The idea was a rocking one, because it would save the shops from the cost and unnecessary pain of developing individual website and maintaining it. We would charge a simple premium for it.

We started the project with myself looking at the technical and operational aspects and my friend looking at the marketing aspect. I took the open source e-commerce platform " opencart " and customized it to my needs. The basic site was done in 15 days. Then came the long testing and modifying phase. This was a very painful phase, because every now and then the site used to have problem, and it really sucks to solve it without proper web-site building experience. Anyways, I finished the site after a month and then the marketing started.

We had lots of issues during the marketing phase. Most of it was due to the unknown market we were targeting. The site was one of its kind in Nepal, so it was not really tested before. All we did was thought of the idea to be amazing and started to work on it. And new things are really resisted by the conventional market. Changes are always difficult.

After a month, we still had no customers. The shops who had previously shown interest had already built their own e-commerce sites. And some were just not convinced of the benefits of e-presence.

Three months into the project, our patience was running out. This is where the learning comes. When you starting a venture, you will have a very turbulent time, with lots of ups and downs. If you don't love what you are doing, then this is the time, most business commit suicide. The entrepreneurs just can't take the blow, because at one end they are not getting revenues and at the other end they are not loving what they are doing.

This is the learning of Part 1 of my journey. If you are to do something new, always do it in the field you know and you love, because there will be tides in your way, and only your love towards what you are doing will give you the courage to be patient and sail through the bad time.

Remember, always do what you love (of course it needs to be profitable on the long run).

Setting Password on PLANET ADSL Router

Goto the router by typing 192.168.1.1 in the browser.

Then goto Network -> WLAN -> Security as shown in the figure below.

Then select the Select Encryption as WPA(AES) as shown by circle number 4 in the figure.

As shown in circle 5, set the desired password and save the settings.

Connecting Plastic coated Wires

When connecting wires which are coated with plastic like in case of audio output wires and telephone cables, you need to get rid of the plastic coating at the ends so as to connect them in a conducting manner.

For this, take the ends and use fire or a blade to remove the plastic coating. Then only connect the wires.

This may seem a trivial thing to many but I found out that non-technical people mostly connect the wires with the plastic coating on and they burn their head trying to figure out why it didn't work.

Also, it was found that in some cases, instead of plastic, paint was used. Paint acts as insulator as well as a color coder for the wire.

Servo Motor Problem : Clean up the shaft

The servo motor in my house, which is used to pump water stopped working last night. It was giving a small humming noise and was actually eating up power ( I switched on the light and the power of light went down when I switched on the motor). But, water was not being pumped. And also absent was the big sound it creates when pumping water.

First, I checked the wire connections to see if there was any discontinuity. But that was fine.

Then I opened up the back end of the motor, where the fan is situated. Refer to the highlighted screws in the image below to open up the back-end. I opened the back part, and cleaned up the shaft that holds the fan. Due to the accumulation of dust and mostly hair in the shaft, the rotor was not movable during normal operation. Only, after cleaning the shaft did the rotor work properly. After cleaning the shaft and manually rotating the shaft for few rotations, I put the back-end back to the motor.

Hurrah ! I had the motor working again.

Generating Android app for a website

If you want to generate an Android app for the website you just designed, all you need to do is go to a website :- Appsgeyser

The website simply generates an Android application short-cut for your website. You will have an icon of your choice(select a proper image file) in the Android app list and this will act as your short cut to the website while browsing from Android.

I generated my Android App for the website 977 Mall.

PS :- The output App from the appsgeyser site is a APK file. You will be required to enable the settings for install from third party in the Android machine.

Light in a bottle - Recreation

After watching the video on Light in a bottle by Isang Litrong Liwanag Foundation , we tried to recreate this.

Requirements :-
1) A clean transparent bottle.
2) Pure drinking water.
3) Bleaching powder.
4) Dark room environment.

Steps :-
1) Put the water and bleach powder into the bottle. Stir it well and then seal the lid.
2) Put the bottle in a dark room environment, with upper half above the environment and the lower half in the environment.
3) Expose the upper half of the bottle to the sunlight.

Results :-
1) The fluorescent light generated was awesome. Check the link

* Notes :- Need to find out the duration for which the bottle continues to glow without adding further bleach powder.

Finite State Machine Compiler and Explorer in HDL

When compiling the HDL code, FSM Compiler and FSM Explorer come into picture. These tools hugely optimize the resource used by the logic in terms of space and timing.

FSM Compiler :-
-> It automatically detects state machines in the source code.
-> Implements the state encoding depending on the number of states present in the state machine, i.e.
    a) 0-4 states :- Sequential encoding.
    b) 5-24 states :- One hot encoding.
    c) >24 states :- Gray encoding.
-> Performs reachability analysis, i.e.
    a) optimize away all state that can't be reached.
    b) optimize all transition logic that can't be reached.

FSM Explorer :-
-> Uses Finite State Machines extracted by the FSM Compiler.
-> Runs through each encoding style as discussed in the FSM Compiler segment. And this tool will select the best (most performant) implementation.