Backup Room – The h Bar

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Vishnu

07:48

@John Rennie: Hi Sir! How are you? It's been a very long time since we talked before.

John Rennie

@Vishnu Hi :-)

What are you doing these days?

Vishnu

My fifth semester exams ended just day before yesterday, and I've just started my winter break, sir :-)

I'm started to do some personal projects, although I feel they are quite simple.

How are your Christmas preparations going on?

John Rennie

I'm going to my mother's house for Christmas. We always have a big family get together at Mum's house.

So my Christmas preparation only means buying the presents and a train ticket :-)

Which college did you go to? I'm sure you have told me, but I forget these things.

Vishnu

@JohnRennie That's great :)

@JohnRennie That's entirely fine sir. I'm studying mechanical engineering at NIT Trichy :)

John Rennie

08:03

How are you enjoying it? Has it been good fun?

Vishnu

Yes sir. It was quite a ride. :D
Certainly enjoying it on the whole.

John Rennie

Good :-)

I had a good time at university and I'd like every student to enjoy it as much as I did.

What projects have you been looking at?

Vishnu

I'm planning to build a fixed wing RC aircraft, and design my own flight controller for it by designing a custom PCB. I had few ideas which I thought would be cool to see how it works, like using two digital pressure sensors that can be hooked up to an Arduino and calculate airspeed much like how the usual pitot-static system works. There were some more ideas, like implementing an automatic CG calculation system and checking if it falls within the limits.

And some kid like desires to include gear retraction system, and of course lights :)

John Rennie

Cool :-)

Lots of friends of mine have got into messing around with various types of microcontrollers. Some Aduinos, but also ESP32 and RISC-V controllers.

I wish I had the time to dive into this but I just don't at the moment.

Vishnu

@JohnRennie Nice. It's always fun to have some control over mechanical elements with these microcontrollers. In fact, to be precise, I'm also using ESP32 mainly because of its processing speed and cost.

@JohnRennie :/

But sir, there is a problem with this or at least on my end. Even though I'm certain that this project is something I would really enjoy doing, a part of my brain tells that everything in this is tried and tested, like we already have autonomous flight and will it be good enough if I do it as an engineering student? Of course, there will be lots of learnings, but this minor loop of thought process seems to backfire. Do you have any opinions or suggestions on this?

John Rennie

08:21

I suspect everything you could reasonably do as a student has been done before. No-one expects students to do ground breaking new work.

The main point of doing projects is to learn some engineering and some project management skills.

My view would be if you enjoy it then go for it.

If it needs to be part of the university course then I guess you need to check with your profs whether they would accept it as a valid project.

I have to say it sounds a lot of fun. I suspect controlling a plane is going to involve a lot of learning about control theory (a subject that I know nothing about!)

Vishnu

@JohnRennie Ok sir. Thank you for sharing your opinion. Actually, it's a personal project done just for my own fun and it isn't part of the curriculum. I was in the decision process before I fully commit. But I'm most probably going forward with the project.

@JohnRennie :-)

Incidentally, I also started learning control theory from a course on mechatronics I took this semester.

John Rennie

It has always seemed an interesting subject to me. It's just that I have too few lifetimes to do everything that looks interesting :-)

Vishnu

Currently, everything is in my drawing note. I'll try to convert things into proper CAD and also design the PCB stuff. I'm estimating to take a month or so to completely finish it and keep it ready to fly. I'll try to update it with you at the earliest about the results.

On the transmitter side, since I'm designing it, I thought of introducing "active" control to the joysticks much like the relatively new active control sidesticks.

John Rennie

I'm afraid you're way ahead of me now! I know some basic electronics that I learned as part of my physics course, but I would be completely lost trying to understand RC circuits.

Vishnu

Ah that's totally fine sir :-)
The other day, someone in LinkedIn contacted me saying that they were observing and gained useful insights from physics conversation we used to have, and I think he had joined in our college, probably in my junior batch I think.

Nostalgia
I really learnt a lot and satisfied my curiosity with discussions with you on different physics concepts.

John Rennie

08:36

I fear that the JEE preparation doesn't give you a lot of free time to have fun learning physics, but at least once it's over the courses at IITs give you more opportunities.

But if discussions here helped then that's great. It's all good karma for me! :-)

Vishnu

:-)

Good bye sir :-)
Will update you once things get off the ground, hopefully.
Have a great day!

John Rennie

And you! Bye :-)

Vishnu

4 hours later…

HNQ

12:43

Q: Can an electron "annihilate" with something other than a positron?

Processes like the electron-positron annihilation are widely known and they give us the impression that "matter annihilates with antimatter." However, I am wondering if this repeated phrase holds for other kinds of reactions. Can an electron and an antimuon annihilate each other into photons? If ...

6 hours later…

HNQ

18:38

Q: Navier-Stokes equation (notation for convection term)

Incompressible Navier-Stokes in vector notation is written as $${\partial U \over \partial t}+(U\cdot\nabla)U =-\frac{1}{\rho} \nabla P + \nu \nabla^2(U),$$ where $U$ is velocity vector field $U=(u,v)$, $\nu$ is the kinematic viscosity and $(U\cdot\nabla)U$ is the convection term. External force...

fluid-dynamics notation flow navier-stokes

2 hours later…

HNQ

20:20

Q: Do we need a quantum gravity theory to model an hydrogen atom on earth?

The hydrogen atom is a quantum mechanical system. However, it is also attracted by the gravitational pull of the earth. Therefore, do we need quantum gravity to model its behavior correctly? Conversely, can we study hydrogen atoms on earth to obtain new information about quantum gravity?