Shanmukha: Internal Smart India Hackathon 2024 at Vishwakarma Institute Of Technology.

Celebrating our team " Shanmukha " , for competing till power jury round in Internal Smart India Hackathon at Vishwakarma Institute Of Technology. I thank my team members for achieving this feat Aashish Kapase, Samruddhi Kaware, Eshan Dasarwar, PARTH KALLURWAR, Ishika Dhoble A grand event organised by our SPOC Prof. Dr. Vijay Mane, for the detail evaluation of 150+ teams, by the top class industry experts juries. We thank Sanskar Vegad our jury for giving us the insightful feedback on our stage 2 evaluation and also in power jury round.

We cleared stage-1 (out of almost 450+ teams, 9 teams with same problem statement as ours), and stage-2 evaluations (out of 250 + teams, 3 teams with same problem statement as ours) but, I guess we were not that prepared to clear the power jury round (we were the only team with problem statement id 1651), but the experience and feedback form this hackathon has elevated my perspective and understanding of "Problem Solving" to new dimension.

Our problem statement id was 1651, "Microphone array-based direction of arrival for gunshot detection" from DRDO, Ministry of Defence, Govt. of India,

The problem statement demanded a FPGA (field programmable gate array) based solution for this with "gunshot sound " being the only input to the system and , "approximate angle of detected gunshot " to be displayed on graphical LCD as output, even though the problem statement looks like a hardcore hardware domain, surprisingly this is a software domain problem,expecting for innovation in SSL (sound source localization) algorithms and data signal processing techniques.

One practical solution was given by CDAC - Thiruvananthapuram with matching description of problem statement.

We decided our approach as follows:

1. Simulating and doing DSP and applying SSL algorithms in Matlab

2. Converting .mat files to .v files in verilog/VHDL (hardware description language) using inbuilt converter.

3. Then synthesising the .v file using Xilinx VIVADO software to make it up loadable on FPGA (a trainer dev board like Basys 3 Artix 7 fpga)

We were also going to give shot to using, MyHDL Python library, but given my less than little experience in FPGA, DSP and SSL algorithms in past, the only thing i was able to create in Matlab was, a 3 kHz band-pass filter to convert the .wav file of gunshot sample at 44.1 kHz sampling from kaggle into frequency domain using fast Fourier transform, and a script to record the live audio from laptop microphones and play it back using same laptops speakers.

As proof of concept of problem statement my idea was as follows,

1. Take the live audio input from laptop microphones

2. Filter and clean the audio and look for the specific frequency band, 3 kHz

3. Produce the gunshot sounds from different places.

4. Do TDOA (time difference of arrival) algorithm of beam forming to determine the direction of arrival.

5. A GUI with arrow pointing in the expected direction.

Which i was not able to fully create and present it to the power jury as Ayush Singh Negi asked me

".. ab tak kya kya hua hai ?",

"... what have you implemented till now ?" , I only had band-pass filter and input mechanism implemented, which as i was only tinkering around, also didn't had on spot.

And according to my analysis after end of the day, this was the point we lost the power jury round. and that reminded me a important lesson,

Ears are not the buyers, Eyes are.

The only point that set us apart from the winning teams I talked to, was a WORKING proof of concept, let it be a app, website, GUI, or hardware.

After that we had certificate distribution event, I was immensely happy even though we were not one of the qualified team they were cheering for, but i was not the same person after that event. And that's how this 13 hours event came to an end.

Now preparing for Smart India Hackathon 2025.