https://electronica-india.com/en is slated as “South Asia’s leading trade fair for electronics”. The Bengaluru edition was held at the BIEC (Bangalore International Exhibition Center). Our visit to the expo helped us witness how far India has progressed as designers, producers, traders and consumers of electronics.
Its not difficult to see why. We are surrounded by smart electronics devices. The watches on our wrists, the mobile phones in our pocket, the sign-boards en-route, the control systems on our cars and bikes, the navigation systems guiding the transports, the televisions, the coffee machines, the lamp on your desk… It is obvious how electronics has pervaded our lives and how it has improved our quality of living. It is what makes us a modern civilization. Evidently, AI is the new frontier, but AI is of no use in ether. AI becomes useful when it is able to augment our work and be able to interact with it and with us. Electronics is the bedrock on which this new world will be ushered in.
There were hundreds of stalls. There were chip manufacturers, PCB fab suppliers, service providers, component vendors and electronic goods producers across the spectrum.
Tinkerbee was featured at the Millennium Semiconductors stall for our nB-IoT board featuring Nordic Semiconductor nrf9151 that has also been fully integrated with Reliance Jio‘s network giving us good coverage across India. We have recently signed them up as our vendors for our key chips.
We have been working on LoRaWAN® (click the link to know more about these wireless technologies) for a few years now, which is a wonderful invention of Semtech corp that provides long range, low power communications, especially suited for sensor data.
We have designed and supplied temperature, humidity sensors, depth sensors, relay controllers and compact weather stations which use LoRaWAN®. Our WeatherBee® was one of the featured devices on Semtech’s Wall of devices this year at the expo!
The expo also featured other companies that we have worked with, like Core-IoT (antenna) and Microplacer (PCBA). It was good to see them all there!
We also got a chance to meet some interesting companies there with whom we may work with in the near future.
The most interesting part was our travel to and from the expo. We are based out of Sarjapura Road, which is one end of Bengaluru while BIEC is at the other end! In previous years, we have either taken a taxi/ car and it was no fun traveling for 2 hours in our infamous traffic.
This time, we took a train from Carmelaram Station to Yeswanthpur railway station that took about 45 minutes and cost Rs. 10 each and then a metro from the Yeswanthpur station to the Madawara station that cost us Rs. 50 each and took only about 30 minutes! In all, it rook about one and a half hours. And for the first time, the journey did not seem tiring 🙂
We think the railway tracks are a grossly underutilized transport option in Bengaluru and I hope Indian Railways make the local trains more frequent!
