Participate in National Instruments' VI Mantra 2008 Contest and win a chance to attend the worldwide Conference on Virtual Instrumentation at Austin,

Join the Virtual Instrumentation Revolution, Share the Innovation!

Graphical programming is proven to nurture Innovation and Creativity in engineering education through collaborative project-based learning. National Instruments provides a common graphical framework for Academia, Industry and Research which enables visualization of truly multi-disciplinary engineering concepts and enables Experiential Engineering Education.

VI Mantra is an annual paper contest for students and researchers to present their main projects, solutions and prototypes based upon NI tools. The paper could be in the field of graphical system-based Design, Control and Test.

How to participate?

Choose the contest category you fall under and click on it below to download the VI Mantra 2008 kit - Student or Research Scholar

Send us a 200 word abstract of your project(s) in the format as provided in the kit (max 5 per group)

National Instruments will call for papers for the selected abstracts

The best 50 abstracts will be published and the top three entries will be rewarded

Last Date for submission of abstracts : 20 Aug, 2008

Call for Final Papers : 25 Aug, 2008

Last date for submission of papers : 25 Sep, 2008

Email abstracts/papers to: vimantra2008@ni.com

Prizes to be won under each category:

First Prize: A chance for the winner and his guide to attend the worldwide Conference on Virtual Instrumentation during NIWeek 2009 in Austin, Texas

Others:

• A chance to present the winning paper to Industry Experts at the 7th National Conference on Virtual Instrumentation in Engineering Education 2008 in New Delhi for the top three winners
• LabVIEW Student Version worth US$100 for the winning participant and a certificate from National Instruments for the top three winners
• VI Lab up-gradation/set up worth US$5000, US$2500 and US$1000 for the respective top three respective winning colleges!

Student inventors

Only in a student inventor's world, maybe, can an automatic rasam-maker and an automatic money depositing machine stand next to each other. But for a group of students of Savitha Engineering College, who worked on these two projects, this does not represent an irony.

The students, graduating this year with a B.E., worked on the money depositing machine for their project and managed to scrape together enough to build a prototype that accepts notes in denominations of Rs. 50 to Rs. 500 for deposit, or prints out demand drafts without the need for a human operator. They also built a system that can cook a three-course meal for four with only the raw materials in just 45 minutes.

These students are part of a growing student inventor community in Tamil Nadu. Engineering colleges in the state are acting as incubators for novel ideas, and are conducting many paper and model presentation competitions. The increased enthusiasm has also reflected in more attention from industry.

The ongoing Auto Components and Machine Tools Exhibition (ACMEE 2008) features stalls from eight engineering colleges, displaying their prototype models.

One of the teams from Velammal Engineering College shows the cheap car for the physically challenged in a nearby stall. Developed in 2007, the car has already been featured in the media. Now it is getting some attention from the industry, as the developers explain its features to visitors from engineering companies.

Students from VelTech Engineering College show a more efficient transmission system that they have developed. They say that they built the prototype from scratch and have also applied for a patent. The stalls at ACMEE 2008 are clearly giving a boost to students who have the enthusiasm to innovate, and it has to be seen whether this will translate into tangible results in the form of marketable industrial products.

SHYAM RANGANATHAN