Last Saturday[2nd Dec,2006] we, a group of 12, went on a trip to Ramanagaram. The spot is around 50 kilometer away from Banagalore city along Mysore road. We started by 12.30 pm from Bangalore and reached Basavana Pura by 2’o clock. The trip was “outsourced” and so our organizer Lalit had arranged lunch at the base camp Thimayya Academy. We played volleyball for one hour; it was my longest volleyball practice. After that we did Obstacle River crossing, sorry there was no water underneath, but we could experience a flavor of what and how people do that.
Along with our instructor, we went for chimney climbing. The location is full of rocks and shrubs. Those rocks are too gigantic in size and attractive in shape. We could see huge rocks tempting to fall down. It was adventurous to walk and jump form rock to rock along with the thorny plants. Some times rocks revenged me pretending that they are strong enough to hold my foot steps, but they toppled when I stepped on them. There is a special spot for chimney climbing. This activity was an unexpected one. There are two parallel rocks separated by around 50cms, we have to climb up between those rocks using our arms, back, knees and legs… execution algorithm is some thing like this… lock yourself using foot and knees and move up by putting weight on your palms along with sliding on your back. My shirt torn as it pressed over the rough rock. There was a man who protect us from falling down, he hold the thread which is tied to our waist. The separation between the rocks is more at the top and it was difficult and interesting to tackle the last step.
Next item was rappelling. By this time, sun had shut off its lights, but moon was there as a torch for us. It was almost full moon. The location and the arrangement of the rock are too cute. The rock is almost 150 foot in height and rough. First interesting thing is that, there is a sloppy way to climb up the rock. Once we reach there, we put ourselves to a seat belt kind of thing, which will be hooked to a long rope running down the rock to the ground. Instructor created a free-lock arrangement with the rope which we can control while we move down. Arrangement was done to do this two at a time. We have to lean back and apply force back to move down the rock. I was really amazed at the way human tackle difficulties with tactics. Here the idea was some tricks with knots. If we want to stop on the way down, we have to just hold the thread allocated to your left and right arms. And the scariest moment was when I started my descending where we gradually change from horizontal orientation to vertical orientation.
Next item was the most dreamt one when I decided to go to Ramanagaram…night trekking. We decided to walk through the reserved forest. We had two torches with us along with some good “torchy” mobiles. Instructor led the pack, it was around 7 pm by that time and it was completely dark. Instructor cautioned us that Ramanagaram is famous for snakes especially vipers. The path was full of shrubs and bamboos. Though we couldn’t see any animals and creatures, we enjoyed the walk, since we expected anything in front of us at each moment. We walked for around 45 minutes and at last we reached near the base camp. Time was 8.30 pm.
Compared to Coorg trek, this time the scene was of rocky touch, looks like they are balancing the earth in some way. And their surface is clean without any plants on them, which felt that they are proud and rough.
Tuesday, December 05, 2006
Monday, November 13, 2006
Coorg Trek
On last Saturday [Nov 11, 2006] we, a group of 21, trekked to “Tadiyandamol ” peak in Coorg hills. It is the second highest peak in Karnataka which is 1751 meters above the sea level. We started our journey from Kembagowda bus station Bangalore. Journey to Madikkeri was a 6 hour over night experience. We reached there by 5’o clock morning. After doing refreshments, took bus to Napoklu.. bus passed Kekkebe and we had to get down at palace bus stop, its around 5 minutes after Kekkebe. We couldn’t see any shops in this bus stop, we knew this earlier and we had stocked enough food.
We started walking at 8.45 morning… out first base station was palace; history says that it was built in 17’s. We resumed our journey after spending some time near that palace. Some of us were fast in climbing, they lead us. Arvind was the main attraction of the trek; this was his tenth trek to Tadiyandamol. He has a fare amount of experience that he shared with us and sometimes he was silent. He is very much supporting and encouraging the group.
Our second resting point was a rock, it’s around half way I seems. There is a water stream near by, we filled our bottles. It was really amazing to jump over the rocks and to up the stream with Jene John. The shape and various colours of rocks with small trees and shrubs grown on both sides gave spectacular scenery to that stream. Water was really cold and the rocks are slippery too. After thirty minutes of rest, we resumed our walk. The remaining part was hard and at the same time most beautiful… we felt steepness slowly increased that we couldn’t step easily from one leg to another. I was trying to enjoy jumping from one stone to another… the pack moved steadily and in a rhythm.., half way, when we reached a fence made of stones, we had some biscuits and chocolates… quantity was more than enough. With in five minutes, we entered the jungle, it looks to be rain forest and the path was narrow… We couldn’t see any animals there, but Aravind said we could see elephants in summer (April, May) as they come down in search of water.
With in one hour, we conquered the peak.. time was 12.20 pm. The peak is approximately 7Km from the palace bus stopWe could see all around, Arvind was naming the near by peaks..sorry I don’t remember their names. He explained his terrible experiences he had in one his three days trek in 1980’s. One major attraction of the peak was the 360 degree view since it is the tallest among the near by peaks. One main scene was a bird, which kept balancing in air for minutes. I don’t remember its name though. We had full fledged lunch there; every one shared their own packs among all of us. Food was surplus but we managed to complete it and it was interesting to see every one caring to keep plastic and other wastes in a separate cover.
We started moving down by 2pm. I felt it was more difficult to move down and is hard to balance. We found time to spend some time in the stream near that rock. We reached bus stop by 5.15pm. Every thing went fine as scheduled till now. Reached Madikkeri by 7.30 pm. We had our dinner there, visited one temple there. We returned Bangalore by 11pm.
It was really a wonderful experience to spent one day in this trek. There is lot more to conquer in nature.
We started walking at 8.45 morning… out first base station was palace; history says that it was built in 17’s. We resumed our journey after spending some time near that palace. Some of us were fast in climbing, they lead us. Arvind was the main attraction of the trek; this was his tenth trek to Tadiyandamol. He has a fare amount of experience that he shared with us and sometimes he was silent. He is very much supporting and encouraging the group.
Our second resting point was a rock, it’s around half way I seems. There is a water stream near by, we filled our bottles. It was really amazing to jump over the rocks and to up the stream with Jene John. The shape and various colours of rocks with small trees and shrubs grown on both sides gave spectacular scenery to that stream. Water was really cold and the rocks are slippery too. After thirty minutes of rest, we resumed our walk. The remaining part was hard and at the same time most beautiful… we felt steepness slowly increased that we couldn’t step easily from one leg to another. I was trying to enjoy jumping from one stone to another… the pack moved steadily and in a rhythm.., half way, when we reached a fence made of stones, we had some biscuits and chocolates… quantity was more than enough. With in five minutes, we entered the jungle, it looks to be rain forest and the path was narrow… We couldn’t see any animals there, but Aravind said we could see elephants in summer (April, May) as they come down in search of water.
With in one hour, we conquered the peak.. time was 12.20 pm. The peak is approximately 7Km from the palace bus stopWe could see all around, Arvind was naming the near by peaks..sorry I don’t remember their names. He explained his terrible experiences he had in one his three days trek in 1980’s. One major attraction of the peak was the 360 degree view since it is the tallest among the near by peaks. One main scene was a bird, which kept balancing in air for minutes. I don’t remember its name though. We had full fledged lunch there; every one shared their own packs among all of us. Food was surplus but we managed to complete it and it was interesting to see every one caring to keep plastic and other wastes in a separate cover.
We started moving down by 2pm. I felt it was more difficult to move down and is hard to balance. We found time to spend some time in the stream near that rock. We reached bus stop by 5.15pm. Every thing went fine as scheduled till now. Reached Madikkeri by 7.30 pm. We had our dinner there, visited one temple there. We returned Bangalore by 11pm.
It was really a wonderful experience to spent one day in this trek. There is lot more to conquer in nature.
Monday, November 06, 2006
Calculating Relative Humidity in software
Humidity specifies the amount of water content in the atmosphere and relative humidity(RH) is a means of specifying it. Famous method to know relative humidity is comparing the readings of a dry and wet thermometer. This technique is known for even a school student. Actually RH is dependent on the atmosphere pressure also.
In many applications, there are requirements to monitor RH and it is easy if we apply this dry-wet bulb thermometer approach. One way of implementing this is by putting a 2D look up table where dry and wet thermometer readings are its indexes. But this approach will be cumbersome since it is difficult to include pressure vector too.
Best approach will be using the equation using which, we can find the RH directly. This is very reliable and requires less code space compared to earlier method. Looking at the practical implementation, just read the temperatures from dry and wet electronic thermometers and use those values to evaluate RH.
Equation for RH is,
A = 0.00066*(1+0.0011*Twet);
eSwet = exp((16.78*Twet - 116.9)/(Twet + 237.3));
ed = eSwet - A*Pr*(Tdry-Twet);
eSdry = exp((16.78*Tdry - 116.9)/(Tdry + 237.3));
RH = (ed/eSdry) * 100;
Where A is a correction factor and Pr = 101.325 is the normal sea level pressure.
Tdry and Twet are in celcius scale.
This equation can be implemented easily in 8051 or AVR or any other microcontroller without much effort and code space. Actually earlier I thought exponential functions will eat up my uC memory, but when I tried it, it works very fine!!!
This approach of making humidity sensor is cheaper than buying an electronic humidity sensor.
In many applications, there are requirements to monitor RH and it is easy if we apply this dry-wet bulb thermometer approach. One way of implementing this is by putting a 2D look up table where dry and wet thermometer readings are its indexes. But this approach will be cumbersome since it is difficult to include pressure vector too.
Best approach will be using the equation using which, we can find the RH directly. This is very reliable and requires less code space compared to earlier method. Looking at the practical implementation, just read the temperatures from dry and wet electronic thermometers and use those values to evaluate RH.
Equation for RH is,
A = 0.00066*(1+0.0011*Twet);
eSwet = exp((16.78*Twet - 116.9)/(Twet + 237.3));
ed = eSwet - A*Pr*(Tdry-Twet);
eSdry = exp((16.78*Tdry - 116.9)/(Tdry + 237.3));
RH = (ed/eSdry) * 100;
Where A is a correction factor and Pr = 101.325 is the normal sea level pressure.
Tdry and Twet are in celcius scale.
This equation can be implemented easily in 8051 or AVR or any other microcontroller without much effort and code space. Actually earlier I thought exponential functions will eat up my uC memory, but when I tried it, it works very fine!!!
This approach of making humidity sensor is cheaper than buying an electronic humidity sensor.
Web Resources for Quran Studies
Lots of web pages are available to study and understand Quran. Below are some of them that I found very useful among them,
1. Arabic text only:
1. Arabic text only:
http://www.geocities.com/mukmin7/menu.html
2. English only translation:
2. English only translation:
http://www.wam.umd.edu/~stwright/rel/islam/Quran.html
3. Seven transilations in a single page!!!
3. Seven transilations in a single page!!!
http://www.searchtruth.com/chapter_display_all.php?chapter=4&from_verse=1&to_verse=10&mac=&translation_setting=1&show_yusufali=1
4. Text with meaning in five languages: http://www.islamicity.com/mosque/arabicscript/Ayat/1/1_1.htm
5. Word by word meaning [20 juzs] :
4. Text with meaning in five languages: http://www.islamicity.com/mosque/arabicscript/Ayat/1/1_1.htm
5. Word by word meaning [20 juzs] :
http://emuslim.com/Quran/Translation_English.asp
6. Ulum Al-Quran: http://www.youngmuslims.ca/online_library/books/ulum_al_quran/index.htm
7. Way to Quran: http://www.youngmuslims.ca/online_library/books/way_to_the_quran/index.htm
8. In the Shade of the Qur'an - by Syed Qutb: http://www.youngmuslims.ca/online_library/tafsir/syed_qutb/
6. Ulum Al-Quran: http://www.youngmuslims.ca/online_library/books/ulum_al_quran/index.htm
7. Way to Quran: http://www.youngmuslims.ca/online_library/books/way_to_the_quran/index.htm
8. In the Shade of the Qur'an - by Syed Qutb: http://www.youngmuslims.ca/online_library/tafsir/syed_qutb/
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