Career Fair

I was at the MCTF career fair last weekend. It was an event organized by jobstreet.com and was held for 3 days. in Mid-valley. I was there with a classmate (he drove) and were there the whole day. So.. what's the job prospect for an electronics engineer? Well from the fair, most companies as I see it were looking for electrical or mechanical engineers. Although electronics can still do electrical work. We study almost the same subjects.

There were a lot of companies, more than 100, and I deposited my resume in the booth of the company which I find found attractive. I got to say this thought, some of the HR people over there didn't seem interested at all to what they where doing. I asked a few some questions and they were like, "you can visit our website to get more information"; and all I wanted to know was to get to know their company better like what they do and what are the positions open for hiring. I can't say all HR people where like that cause I did meet a few who where really really nice and even went out of their way to give some useful advice.

I had one on the spot interview and it was awesome. the'll get back to me in about two weeks. That's what all the other companies say when I dropped my resume at their booth. Lots of brochures and goody bags containing pens were given out. I want to work overseas and there's this one company in Singapore that I really want to get into. So hopefully I'll be short-listed. 

Our Project

I have been very busy over the last couple of months due to my Final Year Project (FYP) and exams. With all that over now, things are still moving pretty fast for me. I was asked to present our project to an industrial company last week Monday, which I did, and, I'm also job hunting. For a little while now, I want to look back at those hectic months. The times when I was really stressed up and was at the verge of giving up. The times where pressure was so intense I would sometimes sit in front of my PC with a blank mind after running out of ideas on how to troubleshoot my program or hardware. Those sleepless nights, those tearless cries, all that to come up with this.

Our EV prototype

This is my group's FYP. Our topic is to do a study on battery car management system and then build a prototype. My focus was on the micro-controller. It involves writing the program as well as build some hardware. The other parts such as the charger circuit and some other circuitry of the car were done by my other 2 colleagues.

The front view

This prototype has most function of a real car from headlights to tail lights to indicators. There's also a wiper, a cute sounding horn, power window and of course, its wheels are able to turn in the forward and backward direction and a servo to control the left and right directions as well as the brakes. We did consider doing regenerative braking system but we didn't have enough time. So the part about regenerative breaking system remained just an idea. The functions of the car are controlled by a make-shift control panel.

The control panel

I even built my own PICkit2 clone, and it gets me excited just thinking about it =)

PICkit2 clone

The gear system

The pedal that controls the speed of the motor

The small DC motor that drives the forward and backward direction

The other circuitry

The Lightings

Home made wiper

The battery charger

Micro-controller

Our power window

Prototype: Close up 1

Prototype: Close up 2

Control panel from the back

Messy connections

The complete setup

Looking back, all those stressful nights, troubleshooting and debugging, all of it, was worth it. I got to thank especially my colleagues and Michelle for all the help and work done.
THANK YOU!!! IT WAS AWESOME!!! =)