Electronics FAQ

Here, are some pics of our Laboratory. This lab is used by the Research Center and Design Services. Notice how well organized the lab is - I know, I am actually trying to show off here :P

The setup: I have a Intel motherboard inside my office desktop with a built-in serial port. Over the days, I managed to screw up the builtin COM port (and my friends at office did the same to their desktop PCs too.. haha!). What probably happened is that does to some ESD or overvoltage on one of the pins during experimentation caused the RS232 Driver on board the motherboard to get spoilt. As a result, the COM port (COM1 in this case) was detected alright by windows XP but Bray's Terminal or Hyperterminal were either not able to receive or transmit data out of the port. So we all got Serial Port PCI cards which costed around Rs.250 a piece. Each of these cards are based around the CH352 (more specifically CH325L) chip made by WCH (a chinese company). WCH Website (Chinese): www.wch.cn WCH Website (English): www.wch-ic.com CH352 Product Page and Datasheet: http://www.wch-ic.com/product/pci/ch352.asp All these cards have 2 Serial Por...

LARE & UC Micro Systems had put up a stall at Elecrama 2010 (20th to 24th January). We got a fantastic response from all kinds of visitors - professionals and students alike. (Being one of the handful few of electronics based company in a large exhibition full of electrical companies did help! :) ) Here are a few pics from the event:

  What better way to say "Hey! this car belongs to an Embedded Systems Engineer!!!" Of course when I get one, it will be some swanky one with AUTOSAR compliant interconnected (via FlexRay/LIN/CAN) ECUs. By the way this number plate is actually cool in one other way too... MFC stands for Microsoft Foundation Classes - which projects the image that the owner is a complete hardware AND software geek!!

We needed to take photos of our products (mainly UNIBlocks) and put them on our online webshop. We were impressed by the product photos put up on their websites by a few other similar companies based in countries other than India (like Sparkfun, Jee Labs and Seeed Studios). So we set out on a quest for "technology and methodology" for taking the perfect photo of our products. We had a DSLR camera (Nikon D40x), but we needed something more. And since we were at it, I thought why not try to make the whole photography process simpler - so that even those who were new to DSLRs and expensive studio equipment, could easily and swiftly take good photos. Step 1) Eye.fi The first step was to get a eye.fi card. Having a way to quickly and conveniently pull a photo from the camera (and that too wirelessly!) would be super useful - I would be able to look at the final photo immediately after clicking it and check if it has come out properly. This minimizes the time for arriving at opti...

We already have a nice sweet logo for LARE. (See the banner above) But as a company whose major business lies in designing electronics, a simple logo is very desirable. The aim is that the logo's design should lend itself to convenient reproduction via any of the huge variety of processes. For example, the fabrication process for Printed Circuit Boards requires that the logo should be made of monochromatic line art. Here are a few trials by my "confederate in crazy/creative works" towards designing an alternative logo for LARE. Have to admit, trying out various designs for a logo is good fun! Here is a scan of a PCB Panel during when we were trying out various designs for UNIBlocks: Here is a scan of a small PCB with LARE logo on it. The logo has come out sad isn't it!