Pakistani Drones in US Airspace!

The 3rd edition

اسّلام علیکم اور گزشتہ عید مبارک

Assalam Alaikum and Eid Mubarak! This year is turning out to be one of the saddest and the strangest. The world is completely upside down! The COVID situation is getting bad in Pakistan and I know about three people personally who have lost their loved ones due to COVID 19. Then there was the plane crash just before Eid. All of this made this probably the worst Eid ever! With so much negative news all around, it is really hard to stay positive, however being a geek, the SpaceX launch last Sunday returned some of my excitement. In fact it made me realize that as Pakistanis, we can learn a lot of lessons from this launch.

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Lessons from the SpaceX Launch for Pakistanis!

Lesson#1: Perseverance:

Perseverance is a great quality. If you have a goal and go after it with perseverance, eventually you will achieve it. It took SpaceX nearly a couple of decades before they were finally able to launch humans into space. So if you have a goal and you keep working towards it without giving up, and working hard, eventually you will achieve it! Let’s stop looking for shortcuts and start focusing on long term goals!

Lesson#2: Startups & Entrepreneurship:

Founding a startup seems exciting, and Elon Must has proved that you can create a startup about what you’re passionate about and it does work. The only problem is that many of us see the overnight success which usually takes many many years to achieve! However it seems like this is another line of career that many of us can choose instead of the usual career choices!

Lesson#3: Public Private Partnerships:

What Sunday’s launch has proved is a very interesting model. The US government created the demand and a private company fulfilled the supply. This is a great win win. Not only NASA would have saved money by outsourcing their development, they’ve also helped an American company to achieve what most can only dream of! I believe the Pakistani government must adapt this model in many fields to solve the uncountable problems that Pakistan faces! They can’t possibly solve all problems, so this seems a great model. The government should focus on fixing the fundamentals, whereas it should partner up with local Pakistani companies and startups, helping them fulfil government demands, solving problems for the general public. What a great win win this could turn out to be for everyone! For example, education is a very huge problem in Pakistan, but it is not a difficult problem to solve. All the government needs to do, is to allocate budgets, create a demand by identifying the problems that need solving and outsource these problems to be solved by Pakistani startups and companies. This will not only help the government, it will also create startup success stories!

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Pakistani Drones in US Airspace!

Here is another Made in Pakistan story! Integrated Dynamics is a company based out of Karachi that designs and manufactures civilian drones. Back in 2006 I joined the company as a software developer and was awed by what the company had achieved and was achieving. One of the things that I found was that the Integrated Dynamics had exported its drones to many countries including the United States. In fact, Made in Pakistan drones were being used for surveillance on the US Mexico border! The company was founded by Raja Sabri Khan who is an MIT graduate and a brilliant engineer. I can say that as I’ve worked with him, although for a short while and I’ve seen his work first hand! Integrated Dynamics is one of the coolest places to work at!

My first project was to write software for an Antenna Tracking System which used GPS data coming from a UAV and translated it into motor movements to keep the antenna pointed towards the UAV. It was necessary as directional antennas improved the range of the UAV. We used to test it by sending out a Bolan with a transmitter and testing the antenna from the office window, looking it track the car outside as it went from one end of Korangi creek to the other. I also learned some great hacks and intelligent design that went into the design of their products! For example, at that time a VCR was used to record digital information of a complete mission that the UAV was transmitting. The whole mission could be played back in the software by reading that digital data from the video tape! I found it to be a pretty cool hack to use off the shelf technologies in UAV systems.

Most of their products were finished with such high quality that it was hard to believe they were Made in Pakistan products! Integrated Dynamics is one of the coolest companies in Pakistan and I was lucky to experience that company for a short period! I wish someone would make a Discovery Science type documentary about this Pakistani company.

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Cool Products Made in Pakistan!

CodiBot is a very cool Educational Robot that anyone can use to learn the basics of Robotics and coding. It is a great platform to start with and is based on the Arduino microcontroller! Moreover it has many cool sensor and actuator attachments along with coding guides! It has been completely designed and manufactured at Pakistan by LearnOBots. Here is the cool part! I’m the designer of the robot and LearnOBots is my company :). In fact I’m planning on running some YouTube sessions where I’ll be teaching the basics of building Robots using CodiBot and I’d like to know if you would be interested in watching such content? Please fill my questionnaire here and fwd to anyone who would be interested!

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Cool Hack of the Day

I once put my hacking skills on the line by accepting one of my friends who flies a military helicopter to update his GPS firmware from Russian to English! And I almost failed.. Read the Cool hack of the day here!

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Stay home and Stay safe and until next time!

Find me on Twitter on @shamylmansoor