Obstacles in life always teach us something./
_                                                       - prof Chatterjee_

           Though not the same words as those used by prof Chatterjee(thanks to my frail memory) i think the meaning is conveyed!

     The last few days have been very eventful, conducted my first robotic workshop under fsmk along with a team consisting of Aravind,Varun,Harshita nd mike.
   As usual nothing went the way it was planned. The pcb’s which were supposed to arrive on Monday, came late night on Thursday. Friday was spent in purchasing all the components, and Saturday was the day of soldering 36 odd boards. We started in the morning at around 11 and went all the way till late midnight, soldering and then testing the boards.
    Sunday was the day of the workshop. We started off with all our energy. The first part went smoothly. Where i explained the basics and theory required to learn any controller. At this point when we tried to burn a program onto the target board,but there was some problem. We somehow managed to handle the crowd but fixing the boards was impossible.

 We were now teaching the theory and showing various applications of arduino. Aravind gave a demo of his project and Varun his hobby project.
Right in d middle of this set back and confusion Aravind comes up with one line “lets make them make the line follower’s” well it,was a brilliant idea. We used only the sensors and the motor control to build the bot! In the next two hours fsmk office was crawling with bots.
Few were line followers,
Few were wall followers.

  Thanks to Aravind’s quick thinking the day was kinda saved. Our first workshop though not as we had planned but in a much better manner. We solved the problem on the boards and  continued the following week.
It was an experience that will b treasured, despite the troubles and tension.
But at the end of the day it reminded me of the talk with prof. Chatterjee,

1)Never give up, and do not panic!
2)Test everything before you start.




 Obstacles come up, without them our life would be a monotonous bore. These obstacles give rise to challenges in our life which make us better and drive us to our limits. At the end of it, I was happy about the way things went and on the whole i think the participants too liked it.(just guessing ;) )



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