A team comprising Jyotirmoy Guha, Arka De and Aditya Gupta — students of the private sector Heritage Institute of Technology (HIT), Kolkata — has won the TI Analog Design Phase I (TI ADC) contest 2012-2013. The trio of final year students reading electronics and communication engineering, were awarded the first prize of Rs.10,000 in the contest which attracted 350 entries from 102 engineering colleges countrywide. TI ADC is an annual pan-India contest sponsored by the Bangalore-based Texas Instruments India — a subsidiary of the US-based Texas Instruments (annual revenue: $13.75 billion) — to encourage students to develop innovations in electronics.

TI ADC 2012-2013 is the fourth edition of the contest in India. The rules require final year engineering students to submit You Tube videos of their innovations. All submissions were reviewed by a panel of experts who assessed their novelty, completeness, innovative use of analog components and attention to systems optimisation. Based on their recommendation, TI shortlisted 23 projects as winners in Phase 1, 40 projects as consolation prize winners, 12 projects for paper presentation and 34 for poster presentation. All these projects were showcased during the TI India Educators’ Conference staged in Bangalore in early April.

“Our project innovation was about water conservation. In housing complexes, people tend to be negligent about turning off the pump immediately after overhead tanks fill up, resulting in huge water wastage. Our innovation ‘Water management for checking water usage and preventing wastage’ comprises an electronic switch which detects the level of water usage and turns the pump off automatically when the tank is full,” explains Aditya Gupta.

The award-winning techies were guided by Mousiki Kar, professor of electronics and communication engineering at HIT. “We received valuable assistance from TI India in developing our automated electronic switch. The company also provided us some very useful components such as the low power microcontroller MSP430, TLO82 OPAMP etc free of charge,” acknowledges team leader Jyotirmoy Guha.

Although serious about academic  and professional success, the three friends are by no means dullards. Sports aficionados, they also share a passion for books and music. Jyotirmoy plans to press on towards an M.Tech degree. Arka has already been offered a job by Tata Consultancy Services and Aditya is preparing to enroll in a top-notch B-school for an MBA.

Fair winds!

Baishali Mukherjee (Kolkata)