PI Labs
R&D Wing of Panacea Intec.
Where Panacea Intec designs and builds under its own name. The company was started to do exactly this — the four years of contract work in between are what paid for it.
Why it exists
The order things happened in.
We are bootstrapped. No investor, no runway — which meant the products we wanted to build had to wait behind the work that paid for the bench they would be built on.
Building electrosurgical generators for other companies did that, for four years, and taught us a great deal about shipping hardware that has to work in a room where it matters. PI Labs is what the profit from that gets spent on.
Everything below carries its stage in plain sight — live, in development, or still on the bench. We would rather you know which is which than discover it after an enquiry.
- Live
- Running now, in front of real users.
- Pilot testing
- In real use with a first group, not yet released widely.
- In development
- Working system, not yet released.
- On the bench
- Designed, not yet built in quantity.
Hardware
Things with a circuit in them.
The same discipline the contract work runs on — analogue front ends, embedded firmware, power conversion, and an enclosure that has to survive being owned.
Development hardware
PI Millennio.
An Arduino-compatible board that shows you what every pin is doing, and survives being got wrong.
Learning boards fail in two directions at once: they are too fragile for a workshop, and they are silent about what is happening inside them. Millennio puts an LED on every I/O pin, so a student watching the board can see which pin is live instead of inferring it from a multimeter and a guess. Built to industrial tolerances rather than classroom ones, because the boards we hand our own interns have to survive a full cohort.
- Compatible with
- Arduino
- Indication
- An LED on every I/O pin
- Built for
- Teaching benches and industrial rigour
- Comes from
- The boards we hand our own interns
- Status
- Live
Wearable instrumentation
BioHack.
A hamstring band that watches the muscle tire, and says so before it tears.
Hamstring injuries tend to announce themselves a few strides too late. BioHack reads the muscle directly through a custom instrumentation-amplifier front end, pairs that with a six-axis IMU for hip extension and stride symmetry, and turns the two into a fatigue index the athlete can act on — with a vibration cue on the band when the risk score climbs. The interesting engineering is at the analogue end: surface EMG is microvolts riding on mains hum and motion artefact, and getting a clean signal off a moving leg is most of the problem.
- Senses
- Surface EMG · six-axis IMU
- Front end
- Custom INA128 instrumentation amplifier
- Reports
- Fatigue index · hip extension · stride asymmetry
- Warns by
- Vibration cue, on the band
- Status
- Prototype and firmware complete; in pilot testing
Thermal therapy
ThermaWrap.
Cold on the injury without a freezer, a bag of ice, or twenty minutes of warning.
Combat sports produce the kind of injury that wants cold immediately and then again an hour later, which is exactly when a gym has no ice and no freezer within reach. ThermaWrap does it with a Peltier element instead: current in one side, heat pulled out of the other, held at a set temperature for as long as there is charge — and charge comes from a battery or the sun. The hard part is not the cooling, it is the heat that has to go somewhere: a thermoelectric pad that cannot shed its hot face stops working within minutes, so most of the design is the side nobody sees.
- Cools by
- Peltier element, not melting ice
- Runs on
- Battery, with solar top-up
- Holds
- A set temperature, rather than warming as it goes
- Built for
- Ringside and training grounds, away from a freezer
- Status
- Prototype built; in pilot testing
Consumer drones
SmartWings.
Your phone already has the camera, the processor, the GPS and the data connection. The drone is the part it is missing.
A drone spends most of its cost on things a modern phone already carries: a good camera, a fast processor, satellite positioning and a cellular connection. SmartWings leaves those out and takes the phone instead. You dock the handset you own — or the one in your drawer with a cracked screen — and it becomes the aircraft's eyes, brain and link home. Upgrading is swapping the phone. Because the connection comes from the phone's own SIM, the aircraft is reachable wherever there is signal rather than only as far as a controller can shout.
- The phone provides
- Camera · processing · GPS · data link
- We provide
- Airframe · propulsion · flight control · dock
- Upgrade path
- Swap the phone
- Range
- Bounded by cellular coverage, not radio line of sight
- Status
- In development
In-vehicle advertising
Ad-Locate.
An advert for a restaurant is worthless forty kilometres away and valuable ninety seconds away.
Ad-Locate rides in cabs, autos and fleet vehicles and puts a restaurant or a shopfront on the rear-seat screen about a kilometre before the passenger reaches it. That distance is the whole product: near enough that the place is a real option, far enough that there is still time to change your mind about dinner. Where the trip has a booked destination it aims at that; where it does not — most autos, most of the time — it works from where the vehicle actually is. Nothing faces the driver, which is deliberate. The advertiser pays for the placement, we build and supply the box, and the driver takes a share of what runs in their vehicle, which is the only reason anyone would agree to fit one.
- Rides in
- Cabs, autos and fleet vehicles
- Screen
- Rear seat — the passenger's, never the driver's
- Aims by
- Booked destination where there is one, position where there is not
- Shows
- Restaurants and retail, roughly a kilometre out
- Paid for by
- Advertisers; the driver takes a share
- Status
- In development
EV components
The EV Store.
Parts for the people converting vehicles rather than buying them finished.
Electric conversion is held up less by engineering than by supply. Motors, controllers, packs and chargers are scattered across importers who will not tell you whether two of them work together, so the build stalls on a compatibility question nobody will answer. The EV Store carries components for converters and small manufacturers, selected so they can be specified as a system rather than assembled and hoped for. It also sits on the part of our own discipline that transfers directly: power conversion is power conversion, whether it ends up in a generator or a drivetrain.
- Carries
- Motors · controllers · packs · charging
- Sold to
- Converters and small manufacturers
- Selected for
- Working together, not merely being in stock
- Overlaps with
- Our own power-conversion bench
- Status
- On the bench
Connected consumer hardware
PI-Meter.
Goes into the mains lead of the machine you already own, and gives you a budget rather than a bill.
PI-Meter sits in the live wire between the socket and the appliance, measuring voltage, current and real power as they pass through. The part that makes it useful is the limit: you set a duration, a cost or an energy figure, and the device stops the machine when it gets there. A geyser that runs for exactly twenty minutes, a workshop tool capped at fifty rupees of electricity, a pump given two units and no more. Reporting and limits are set over the network, so the constraint follows you rather than living on a dial you have to be standing next to.
- Fits
- Inline, in the appliance's own mains lead
- Measures
- Voltage · current · real power
- Cuts off on
- Duration, cost, or energy consumed
- Set over
- Network — IoT, not a front-panel dial
- Status
- On the bench
Software
Things that run on a server.
Where the problem is a database and a decision rather than a board. Fewer of these, and each one exists because we wanted it to and nobody had built it.
Careers platform
SkillBridge.
Every opportunity an Indian student is actually eligible for, and none of the ones they are not.
Job boards fail students in a specific, maddening way: a civil engineering student searching for internships is shown Google Summer of Code. SkillBridge matches on field of study first and ranks on relevance second, so a civil student sees NHAI, L&T and CPWD — and the reason each one matched is printed on the card rather than left to trust. It carries jobs, internships and courses in one place, because a student deciding what to do next is not choosing between those categories.
- Covers
- Jobs · internships · courses
- Matching
- Field-first, with the reason shown
- Catalogue
- 180 opportunities across 8 fields
- Fields
- Engineering · Science · Commerce · Arts
- Status
- Live at Vivekanand College of Polytechnic
Research tooling
Research Lens.
Hands you a paper's method, findings and numbers before you commit to reading it.
Reading a paper in order to find out whether it was worth reading is an expensive way to triage a literature search. Research Lens takes a URL, a PDF or pasted text, pulls the methodology and the findings apart, and surfaces the statistics that decide whether a result means anything — how many subjects, how large an effect, and what was actually measured. Built for the part of research that is not thinking, so more of the day goes on the part that is.
- Takes
- A URL, a PDF, or pasted text
- Separates
- Methodology · findings · key statistics
- Built for
- Triaging a literature search
- Status
- In pilot testing
Separate ventures
Started here, and left on purpose.
Some things need to be trusted on their own terms rather than on ours. These carry their own name, and we think that makes them better rather than smaller.
Mental health platform
Summit.
Therapy, peer community and crisis support for Indian men, in their own cultural context.
Summit began inside PI Labs and runs as its own venture, under its own name. That is deliberate: a mental health platform has to be trusted on its own terms, and a company that winds transformers has nothing useful to lend it. It carries therapist booking, a moderated peer community, self-assessment and crisis resources, written for family pressure and workplace stress rather than translated from an American product.
- For
- Indian men
- Carries
- Therapy booking · peer community · crisis support
- Runs as
- Its own venture, own brand
- Status
- Live
Apparel
MNML.
One garment, made properly, instead of a catalogue made adequately.
MNML sells black t-shirts and nothing else. The premise is that most clothing is bad because it is trying to be several things, and that a single garment given undivided attention will beat a range every time — cut, weight, neckline and how it looks after fifty washes rather than in the first photograph. It runs under its own name because a t-shirt has nothing to gain from being sold by an electronics company, and we would rather it stood on the garment.
- Sells
- Black t-shirts
- Range
- Crew · V-neck · slim · oversized · long sleeve
- Premise
- Perfect one thing rather than offer many
- Runs as
- Its own brand
- Status
- Storefront built; not yet launched
Drinks
Quench.
Bottled water priced low because the pack is paying for itself.
Two ideas, and each one only works because of the other. The carton is fibre-based rather than plastic, so it can break down instead of outliving everyone who handled it. And the outside of that carton is advertising space, which is what lets the water be sold cheaply rather than at the usual markup on a commodity somebody has to buy anyway. It runs under its own name because a drinks brand lives or dies on the shelf, and nothing about an electronics company helps it there.
- Packaged in
- Fibre-based carton, not plastic
- Priced by
- Advertising on the pack, not the margin on the water
- Designed to
- Break down rather than persist
- Runs as
- Its own brand
- Status
- On the bench
Students
One thread runs through a lot of it.
SkillBridge finds students the opportunity. Millennio is the board they learn on. Our internships are where some of them end up, on hardware that ships. Those three were not planned as a set, but they have turned into one programme wearing three hats.
Interested in any of these?
Tell us which one and what you would use it for. For anything still in development, that conversation genuinely changes what gets built.