He is an Electrical Engineer, working in the field of Test & Measurement at Lumetronics. When not working at his day job, he dabbles in Astronomy, Origami, Photography, Tinkering, Hacking, and Cycling. His choice for the daily commute in Mumbai are his bicycles. He is one of the founder duo of WyoLum Emergents – a global group of Open Hardware enthusiasts. Between all of his hobbies and cycling, he manages to discuss and create original Open Source circuit boards and projects. As a master of hardware design, Anool is the driving force behind WyoLum projects. He is also the co-founder of Makers’ Asylum – one of India’s first community driven Maker Spaces. Anool is also a contributing writer for Hackaday. He lives in Mumbai with his wife – Samata (who is also an avid Maker) and son – Hearsh.
Q1. What you're currently doing ?
Multi-tasking, in one word. Writing on Hackaday, spreading word about the Hackaday Prize 2015, next version of WyoLum project TinyTim, WyoLum project Gearclock, a couple of other skunk works projects that I can't talk about right now, making a few electronics wearable's projects and some more stuff.
Q2. What is Clock THREE Junior ?
We're (WyoLum) fascinated with LED's, Time and Electronics. C3jr is the 4th in line of our series of word clocks that display time by lighting up characters that form a sentence. A LED matrix lights up individual characters to spell time. By changing the face plate and re-programming the microcontroller, we can adapt it to show time in almost any language - so far in English, German, French, Jewish, Irish, Spanish, Dutch and Hungarian.
Q3. Why ClockTHREEjr is introduced when Clock THREE is already there ?
ClockTHREE is similar to the C3jr, but it features a larger 16x10 RGB LED matrix. This was much larger than C3jr, more expensive, and not too easy for hackers to assemble the kits. The C3jr is a much more refined design, allows multiple clocks to be chained together to form larger versions (we have built 3x and 5x versions). The 5x version, called the Chronogram, can show Unix time. We made a bicycle race timer called Kandinsky Clock (or Kandy for short) using six C3jr modules stacked back to back.
Q4. How It's gonna help anybody ?
We built ClockTHREE and C3jr as platforms to allow enthusiasts to explore Time, Electronics and Programming. ?They are all open source hardware and software - the source files are available on our Github repositories. They are based around the excellent Arduino prototyping platform. Till date, we must have sold close to a thousand of these.
Q5. Why you CrowdFunded it ?
We crowd funded ClockTHREE on Kickstarter way back in 2011, garnering over 300% of our projected funding. The earlier ClockTWO had flaws, and we had already spent a lot of money trying to support our growing and expensive hobby electronics. We decided we'd be happy making just 10 boards and kits, besides a few for ourselves. We didn't need the money, nor the business, so we didn't set very high goals.
We came back a year later and did the ClockTHREEjr campaign. Again, we didn't set very high goals, but we got over 1400% of our target funding. Since then, we have never had to go back to crowd funding for any of our subsequent projects. The revenue from the earlier projects kept helping us to create new projects without require external funds.
Q6. Is "Clock three junior" the only product you came with ? or any other product is on the way ?
We've done a lot of other projects. The most challenging was the e-paper based conference badge "BADGEr" that we sponsored for the Open Hardware Summit 2013. "AlaMode" is an Arduino clone that fits on top of the Raspberry-Pi single board computer. This makes it easy to build projects that utilize the power of Linux and the Arduino environment. ?We are about to launch ClockFOUR. There's a bicycle brake light being prototyped. Then there's the I2GPS (which has now evolved in to the ArthurC) - a tiny Arduino clone with on board RTC and SD-Card, and to which a GPS module can be easily interfaced. This makes it ideal for all kinds of data logging applications.
Q7. How many brilliant minds are behind this awesome piece of hardware ?
WyoLum was started by me, Justin Shaw from Reston and Shyama Mandal from Chantilly. Since then, our team has expanded to include David Pincus from Sydney, Kevin Osborn from Boston, Nick Stock from California, Brian Krontz from New York to name a few.
Q8. How your your product affects Society ?
By leveraging the power of open source hardware and software, we are able to bring our ideas to life and share them with the community. The revenue generated from our projects is used to support the Maker community. We have given away thousands of dollars as "WyoLum Innovation Grants (2012 , 2013)", sponsored the Open Hardware Conferences, supported the development of projects such as Codebender and KiCad, helped maker spaces such as Mumbai's Maker's Asylum and NoVa Labs in Reston.
Q9. What is your ultimate Goal ?
To foster the Maker Movement and spread awareness about the Maker Spirit, Open Source Hardware and Software.
Q10. It is OpenSource then how it gonna help makers ?
Open Source Hardware (OSHW) is a term for tangible artifacts — machines, devices, or other physical things — whose design has been released to the public in such a way that anyone can make, modify, distribute, and use those things. This definition is intended to help provide guidelines for the development and evaluation of licenses for Open Source Hardware. Best way to understand the OSHW movement is to visit the OSHWA website. All of our work revolves around open source HW and SW.
Q11. How much time it took you all to completely build "Clock three jr" ?
It's difficult to estimate because this is something all of us at WyoLum do as a hobby. All team members have regular day jobs, so time is contributed based on each persons ability. On an average, each of our projects takes a couple of months at most from concept to prototype.?
