[Chennaipy] April 2017 Meeting Minutes

[Subil Tries To Speak]

## April 2017 Chennaipy Meeting Minutes

Vijay, the organizer, welcomed everyone and started with an introduction on
what
a meetup is and isn't. That it is not a training program but a place to meet
people and exchange ideas. He introduced the first speaker.

### Talk 1 - Module development for wireless systems using Python

Speaker - Ashok Govindarajan

Ashok started with an introduction to the terminologies used in mobile data
technologies such as 4G, uplink and downlink. He explained how calls go from
sender to receiver through the network. He then demoed a module written in
python that simulated the downlink part of the call flow. The module
demonstrated how many bit errors can occur when the signal to noise ratio
and
the number of subcarriers are varied. He used Matplotlib to display a graph
representation comparing the transmitted and received signal. Other
libraries he
used included Numpy and Scipy.

He concluded by explaining his intention of developing educational material
for
ECE students for explaining the concepts touched upon during his talk.


We broke for networking and tea for fifteen minutes.


### Talk 2 - Introduction to Statecharts

Speaker - Vijay Kumar

Vijay began by talking about breaking down complex problems into a number of
simple problems to reduce the probability of error. He explained how state
diagrams can help in this matter. He demonstrated a program that turns a
lightbulb on and off to explain state diagrams. He used the Sismic
framework for
describing the state diagram using YAML and used the GTK+ library for
simulating
a lightbulb.

He further talked about how state diagrams can become very complex for large
problems and promoted state charts as the better solution for such cases. He
talked about the different types of state charts, backed up by more demos of
toggling multiple light bulbs. He ended the talk with some recommendations
for
resources for further study.

### Lightning talks

One audience member spoke about how he was now finally able to understand
state
machines despite having some experience with it in Matlab. Another member
spoke
about using scripts to automate email sending and Facebook "thank you"
comments.
A couple of the members came up to say how thankful they were for the
meetup and
how useful they found it. One last person came to talk about how useful
hackathons are when it comes to forcing yourself to try and learn new
things. He
informed the audience about a hackathon being conducted on May 5th by
Freshdesk
called "Save the Hacker".

The meetup concluded with Vijay giving thanks to the venue and tea sponsors
as
well as to the speakers and the audience. A group photo was taken.
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