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 meeting of my Computer Interfacing Systems class for the eleventh week of the second term, the third year engineering students (most of them anyway, excluding a handful of irregulars) started on their second experiment on parallel port input and output, where the bulk of the processing is done by the external circuit, as opposed to the software, which was their previous experiment.

It was only in that meeting that they realized the use of the two thick electronics components catalogs that I had placed there near the start of the school year. They may have been a year or two old, but the numbers of the integrated circuits for the gates they needed for their experiment did not change.

In fact, I heard one student planning to bring home one of the catalogs for her own use. Not that it matters. I will be adding to that pile at the end of the year anyway, when the 2006 catalog arrives and I dump the old one for 2005.

I just joked with her not to use it for wrapping fish in.

The data sheet of the chips was another thing altogether though, and that one I had to provide for them anew when they asked.

As expected, they did not finish the experiment then, although the groups are almost finished with their circuits and programs.

I am still in the middle of thinking if I should assign to them the three digital readouts for the sports games to be held in the covered court or any other venue, such as the game play countdown timer, the dual three-digit scoreboard and the shot clock, maybe even one for calling attention to the player numbers after fouls or before in game substitutions.

I would want it to be durable, and that means not using illustration boards for the casing on which to attach the banks of light emitting diodes – as I have seen students making similar displays years ago, but probably dark plastic or painted aluminum, and properly labeled to be visible from the far end of the court.

The same has to be expected with the console of controls, with one button for reset another for increasing the number displayed and another for decreasing the number. For the countdown, the starting time should also be easy to set.

Even though the students are used to it, for this type of thing, setting up a computer and an LCD projector is definitely overkill.

Session 869’s own countdown timer reaches zero at this point. Class dismissed.