Nirmiti
Making a difference
Where the idea came from
Vivekanand Dhakane, an M.Tech student at IIT Bombay, came up with the idea for Nirmiti during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, at his hometown Shevgaon.
He was looking for an affordable microcontroller to replace the high-cost Arduino he had used in earlier projects, and came across the STM8S003F3P6, a controller worth about ₹19. He started writing libraries for it, and that grew into the Nirmiti project.
What Nirmiti is
An initiative to make electronics easy to learn, user-friendly, affordable and accessible for every student independent of their language — from school level to degree level, and for hobbyists too.
Hardware and software
- Nirmiti Board V1.3 — the core microcontroller board
- Nirmiti Base Shield V1.3 — the expansion board that carries sensors, motor drivers and displays
- Nirmiti Blocks — a drag-and-drop graphical interface for building a program
- Nirmiti IDE — a text editor in which the code is auto-generated from those blocks
A worked example is the Nirmiti remote-controlled car, driven from the Nirmiti Android app.
Challenges and goals
The project ran into the global chip shortage and the rise in chip pricing, along with delays in the delivery of parts.
- Commercialise the Nirmiti products
- Add more regional languages to the software
- Write a user manual for the software and hardware
- Promote Nirmiti through social media and workshops
