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 meeting of my Integrated Computer Systems lab class for the third week of the second term, I was finally able to give the students the proper set up of the visual basic programming language to be able to send eight bits of data through the parallel port to the waiting circuit, or in this case the waiting light emitting diodes.

There just needed to be an additional file placed in the system folders of the operating system and some additional declarations (four lines) made at the start of each program to access that additional file.

With this adjustment, and after checking that their connections to the parallel port still worked with the use of the executable file I gave them the meeting before, they ran the sample program that turned off one of the LED’s and on again, without encountering any compiling errors.

On one of the computers we used though, the executable file lit the circuit perfectly, but even though the program did not report any errors, the LED’s still did not light.

So since I had no idea what the error could be, I just told them to change computers.

The additional task I gave them for the day, after they have made their “light moving from left to right and back” program and circuit work, was to use a seven segment display and use it to show the digits zero to nine in sequence, without having to use the additional converter chip.

One group was able to perform the task perfectly, lighting the LED’s at the same time, but then for some reason the spreadsheet software suddenly rejected and disabled the macros being used, so they were not able to save them.

But they were able to show me that it worked. It’s just that they had no copy for their files and notes. So they were not really ahead of the other group.

The other group somehow connected the seven segment display wrong to the parallel port data pins, so they had no idea how to make all the numbers come out.

Session 1331 can’t improvise. Class dismissed.