Student "edition" found at {csi dot journalspace dot com}.

Maybe I shouldn't have started this blog now, not with everything that's been going on.

In the three-hour session of my Interfacing Computer Systems students for the fifth week of classes, they finished their count-up and countdown program and circuit.

First of all, I was able to find out where the other seven segment displays were that we were looking for in the last meeting. It seems that the erstwhile head of the school of engineering took them all to test their condition before signing the reimbursement request to give the part-time teacher who bought them his money back.

I was the one who returned the components from his cubicle to the robotics lab afterwards.

Second, the students had to determine the new value of the resistor for each segment of the display from the parallel port output.

In their first attempts, based on the very first circuit that they made with the simplest output, the resistance was too high and they could barely see the lights turn on, even with the overhead lamps in the room switched off.

Lastly, they had to determine if their seven-segment display is active high or active low, and change the values that their visual basic program sends to the parallel port accordingly, from what they had used in the LED digit circuit, which was, of course, active high.

For one of the groups, they had to determine this bit by bit, before converting it to the decimal that they could type in the software.

Every time that one of the groups would complain to me that their set up did not work, I had to tell them to troubleshoot, starting from testing the breadboard to testing if the seven-segment display does work with an assured input, to seeing if there is an output coming from the computer’s parallel port.

This continuation of the previous activity was only supposed to take them the first hour of the session, because even as they stepped into the room, I was already assigning them for the new experiment, which now tests the input of the parallel port.

I told them what command to use for those who will be writing the software, but before they even try to connect the new circuit, I told them to give me a copy of the schematic diagram first to check.

But it seems that we will have to start on that next meeting. And I will have to give them a written exam very, very soon.

Session 805, which is active low, gets sent a high voltage at this point, and thus deactivates. Class dismissed.