Hi all, wanted to share my experience at the IIT Delhi summer camp that I had recently attended, with a small writeup and some clips.

IITD hosted a DIY summer boot camp named ‘Change Makers’, where students across India were chosen through a form and an interview. the students of classes 11th and 12th were chosen for this program, and they had access to the Institute’s state-of-the-art facilities to convert their impactful ideas to reality.

It was a non-residential boot camp, held from 23rd May to 24th June 2022. It involved hands-on, rapid prototyping-based training in digital and mechanical fabrication. The training took place at the Makerspace (a DIY facility at IIT Delhi). After the training, the students were able to avail the IIT Delhi facilities till the end of the boot camp to build projects aimed at addressing some high-impact societal problems.

My experience?

I got to know about the change-makers summer boot camp just after the last date for registration had passed. I never expected to be able to visit the hallowed precincts of IIT Delhi, the aspiration of every PCM student. By some stroke of luck, I was selected for this prestigious program. Thank you so much to the staff at IIT Delhi for seeing the potential maker in me and allowing me to have such a great experience at a place I never thought I would be able to visit.

Visiting the maker space was a tinkerer’s dream come true, and it was a fantasy land for those who wanted to ideate, design and hold the final product in their hands. It was exactly what I had imagined to be, a huge area with all sorts of tools, from laser cutters, 3D printers, CNC routers, Water jets and more. It was truly exciting to enter this large room every day.

I really enjoyed interacting with the other innovators there. working with them and learning from them has been a personal milestone for me. Seeing how they approached a problem, giving their creative ways to solve it, and how everyone worked together has been an important step in increasing my teamwork skills.

Every time I asked the mentors a question, I would go back to my breadboard circuit, knowing how that one component finally worked. They were the epitome of the proverb –

“A single conversation with a wise person is better than 10 years of study.”

My team and I worked on a project called “Jaltech”, which allowed users to reuse reject water from R.O. systems. The reject water can be used for various useful tasks like watering your plants, cleaning the dishes, giving your pet a bath etc. it was an automated system which would monitor factors like the water level, the TDS and pH value. The reject water is collected over time, and the system would dispense the water automatically to the area of need. it measures and adjusts the pH and TDS level of the water to make it suitable for watering plants. It was designed using a microcontroller (ESP32) called the ‘TTGO’, which could be programmed as per our needs. This idea was suggested by me, and after getting the green flag from my team and the professors on campus, we worked on the design, programming, soldering, and assembly to make it into a functioning prototype.

We got to visit the biochemistry and chemical engineering lab, and I want to thank the professors who made those lab visits possible. They were a huge eye-opener for all of us, and I really hope to pursue something related to this in my future education. If the opportunity were to present itself again, I would definitely sign up for something like this again.