Now, black box for your vehicle

Inspired by the 'black box' (flight data recorder) used in airplanes and trains, four girls from a college at Latur in Maharashtra have developed one for automobiles. In case of a mishap, the product can help determine the exact cause from the recorded data.

The product, developed by Sailee Sudhakar Reddy, Priyanka Suryakant Salve, Manjushree Anurath Bhise and Dipali Gangadhar Sadekar, is mainly targeted at owners of heavy transport vehicles. If taken up by the industry, the innovators believe it can be modified and used for cars, too.

"The basic idea of the project is based on the black box used in airplanes and trains. The system parameters like speed, engine temperature and gear position are continuously displayed, whereas the fuel level is indicated by an LED. We simulate all the parameters using a PIC MICRO controller & LCD display. The thrust of our project is to keep hardware at a minimum, making it compact and easy to mount on the vehicle," say the innovators, who are pursuing a degree in automobile engineering from Government Residential Woman's Polytechnic, Latur.

The product is being promoted by SRISTI, an Ahmedabad-based NGO, under an initiative called Techpedia, which encourages collaborative research by linking the needs of industry and grassroot innovators. SRISTI's portal has taken 10,001 such technology student projects under its wings and aims to mentor the innovators behind these.

According to Anil Gupta, president of SRISTI and a professor at Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, "There are about 6,00,000 technology students who spend at least six months in their final year doing a project. And yet, nobody knows the fate of these projects.By creating the techpedia, we aim to provide a platform for students who create outstanding low-cost processes and products to be professionals in their chosen fields. The portal can also be a problem solver for the small scale industry."

SRISTI's partner, National Innovation Foundation, has so far filed for 226 patents on behalf of innovators across the country.