Part 2 : Final Year Project: Mitsubishi Electric Cup

(This is a continuation of the last post from the Final Year Project for Mitsubishi Electric Cup series)

Day 1: Welcome

On day one, participating teams were supposed to reach the venue, the College Of Engineering, Pune, with our projects. We then had to register, find the allotted stall.

After reaching the venue, we saw the grand arrangements made by the Mitsubishi. Many hoardings were pointing us towards the event direction as we got closer to the location. Mitsubishi also had huge advertising hoardings all over the city. After entry, we got near to the building where the event was supposed to be. There was massive hoarding of the Mitsubishi Electric Cup along the wall of the building. Here is the picture we took.

As we enter the building, we found some familiar faces of the Mitsubishi Team. Their stalls were somewhat standard, the kind you may find at an expo, and there we people still working and perfecting the place.

We then arranged our project on a table for display. We had worked hard to make our system easy to assemble. The ease of assembly was essential to us as a feature and also to save time. Sometimes in a few competitions, we don’t get enough time to assemble the project.

Essentially we only had to hook up power. Connect the pipe to the water pump, connect the well-labeled interconnects to each other. And arrange the setup to look visually pleasing, and we were all done within minutes.

Other teams

Many or most of the participants were from out of state. Teams were coming from all the parts of India. So they had to travel by disassembling their project into small pieces to make it easier to carry. Thankfully, they had a lot of time to do so. But many of them had to burn the midnight oil to get the project ready by the next day.

After completing our assembly, we took the liberty of roaming around and looking at other teams and their projects. Most of them were huge and in comparison to our project. Both of us got concerned that our project is not grand enough. We found some familiar faces from our training days. And it was interesting to see their projects. (SPOILER ALERT: Many of them got prizes, we were trained by the best)

By that time, we noticed that we were the only two-person team and all the rest of the teams had the maximum number of personal permitted in one project.

Photos of the projects we visited

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By the time we came, teams had assembled at the auditorium for the welcome speech from the Mitsubishi’s and COEP heads. It was a lavish auditorium. The room had wooden paneling on both sides, a large stage, and a sitting area with huge projectors and cameras.

We were excited, especially me, as I had been to that auditorium in my first year of engineering. I had attended another competition called DIPEX. Where Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam, Missile Man of India, inaugurated the competition that year.

(You can find the video of the project I presented in my first year on YouTube, but it is in Marathi: Link)

After welcoming us there Mitsubishi’s team gave us a rundown on how things will be going down. We then had lunch there and headed back to our stalls. There we asked to give a basic test on what we had learned during our training which took most of us just a few minutes. We later had dinner arranged by the host and then we headed home to get ready for the next day.

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Day 2: Stunning revelation

Next day when we came back to the COEP we were stunned to see the projects which were assembled after we had left yesterday, we could now see the efforts the students have put into the competition, and this is what makes this competition so great. Few teams had to work all night to get the project ready by the morning and their hard work was noticeable.

Last night we had practiced hard to get our presentation right. We set a few goals for the same. As selling your project is also very important. One of our goals was to make the presentation as simple as possible. As engineers, we tend to run down specs. And throw lots of stats to prove the worthiness of our project, which we wanted to avoid. We put up our research paper on the wall for engineers to dig deeper.
One trick we used to make our presentation better was to note what features resonated with people and refined our presentation over time, keeping the good bits and discarding the fluff. Let me give you an example. One of our features was manufacturing cost of our sensors was less than 10 Rupees. Hearing this made people’s faces glow as they understood the impact of the project.

We run through our list to see what works and what didn’t work. Finally, armed with a presentation that had had evenly spaced jaw-dropping features, we got in front of a panel of judges. And yes, we nailed the presentation and kept the judges’ attention till the end.

Evaluation

Judges were divided into four groups, who visited us during our presentation with the visitors to see our project working it was done over a span of two days. When the first group of judges came we didn’t have our presentation down as they visited us very early but after that, it became easier and easier. It is easy to say “it became easier and easier”, in retrospect but we were under constant pressure then, we could see that we are going great but keeping our nerves calm was hard.

By the end of the second day, we were visited by all four groups of judges.

Mitsubishi had arranged a cultural event for us to relax, it was performances by the students of COEP, we enjoyed it a lot and here are few photos of the program.

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Day 3: The Day

We then also had to go through the final interview where there were all the judges were present in front of us to see our presentation and ask any questions they may have for us.

Again COEP had a great setup and our presentation was on the screen even before we set foot in the room, the whole process was smooth and well planned. As we entered we saw all the judges at a glance, my heart jumped a little, after a brief “how-to” on operating the slide controller by a COEP student we had all the attention.

“I have seen this before, I have been here before”, I remembered. The room was the same room where I took classes for embedded programming lessons from a COEP professor. It was a bit relaxing. Judges were setting on the farthest end of the long oval-shaped table, there were almost 12 – 15 judges waiting for us to start.

Presentation

Partner and I kept switching between us the narration to have judges interested in the presentation. Our tried and tested catchphrases worked well. We could see their faces glow when they understood and connect with our project. There a few technical questions from the panel during the rest of the Q&A session. After which judges revealed to us what they liked about our project. And how we can take this project further.

Their interest in the project showed us that they understood our project. And we knew our presentation went well. As this was our final year project, the presentation, and Q&A session conducted by Mitsubishi Electric Cup judges helped us in our exams too.

After that, the rest of the day was relaxing as all the teams of judges had visited us. Visitors from many reputed companies visited our stall. One notable person who met us was Mr. M V Kotwal. He is a retired member of the L&T Board & President of Heavy Engineering. He liked our project and asked us to visit him at his residence to implement this project in his farmland. We also were praised by many Japanese delegates from Mitsubishi Electric Japan. They particularly liked our robust industrial design.

Results

In the evening, we were all gathered back in the auditorium for the results of the competition. We were getting more and more anxious by the minute. We were waiting for the judges to distribute the prices. There were many prices distributed and yet we didn’t win.

We were getting demoralized by the minute as only the top prices remain. And as we started to lose hope, one of the judges called upon us. We received the 3rd price, which ranks us 6th in the competition. Both hurriedly ran to the stage. We received the trophy from the judge, and after few photos, we were off to celebrate our win. After informing our families and lots of selfies, we started packing for the day. We said our goodbyes to friends we made there and went home.

Our team was appreciated a lot by our college by publishing our achievements in newspapers and college magazines.

Here are few Cutouts

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We were kindly allowed to keep the device with us for our final year project by the Mitsubishi Electric Cup team. Our team got almost full marks for the project. After the project exam was over, we returned the PLC, HMI, and other components to Mitsubishi.

This competition was one of the best experiences which we could have got as students. I highly recommend everyone to participate.

Until next time, Cheers!

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