Maker Profile: Ankit Guglani
To many, hackathons are a way for experienced attendees to expand their prior knowledge by getting their hands dirty. Get Your Bot On! Is trying to abolish that mentality by creating a hack environment where all people of various career or educational backgrounds, and no experience necessary, can get their hands dirty in order to learn new things. Akit Guglani is a prime example of this who never got his hands on Arduino until he attended the 2012 Get Your Bot On! Robotics Hackathon. Ankit stated in a recent interview with me the following:
“At that time, I had absolutely no Arduino experience and it was something really cool, so I just wanted to learn. What I enjoyed the most about it was that it was different than other Hackathons; it wasn’t just on you as a person, but there were mentors at hand to help out.”
Ankit loves to work with new applications that he hasn't worked on before, as it gives him the sense of exploration and adventure. He can’t get enough of learning new software, and getting his hands on hardware and applications he hasn't even heard of beforehand. Through such adventures, Ankit has homed the work skills that he has used to create new projects. The following are some projects that Ankit has worked on throughout the span of his exploration:
- Polishing up Glassware that will go live soon; making it the first Canadian Glassware on the official Glass Store. *For more information, check out: http://cityspot.org*
- Working on making visualizations of brainwave data from the Muse (a EEG headband from interaXon).
- RaspberryPi based home automation hub.
- Currently has some well-defined plans to work with drones for his next side-project.
You can find Ankit on Twitter @ankitg, or via LinkedIn (http://ca.linkedin.com/in/ankitg).