There wasn’t a lot of progress made this week. The document that was to be completed had a new item added to it: EEPROM. EEPROM is a small type of erasable memory. While there is a physical EEPROM component, the one we made was virtual. Our system counted the amount of times a button was pressed, but the counter wasn’t reset even after unplugging the system, the code needed to be re-uploaded to reset it.
This system would have many applications, as it works similarly to different types of flip-flops (I believe), since it can save memory after being turned off, and so it can be useful in almost any counting circuit. Other than this new component of the document, the last thing to do was to make a bit-maths calculator, however this circuit required a shift register, which is something we don’t have in the classroom. The circuit was intended to take any value between 0 and 255 and represent the various logical operators of that number compared to an LEDmap (in this case a pre-set number) in binary with LEDs. This means that it would take a decimal number such as 38 and compared it to the binary number 1111-1111 (255 in decimal), as the binary of 38 is 0010-0110, the AND feature it return 0010-0110 as those 1’s are the only places where ‘1’ appears in both numbers. This circuit would then display this new binary number as on/off LEDs. While its a shame that I wasn’t able to make this physically, I did play around with the Arduino simulation, and the video provided was very informative on the topic of bit-wise operations.
Other than these two sections, the only work I needed to do was week 2 of the NCSS challenge via Grok. This week’s challenges were a lot harder than last week’s. While the intermediate posed no problem, with the exception of me losing a point due to my incredible spelling abilities, the advanced challenge got very difficult this week. The lack of coding in Python has not helped with this either, as I could not remember anything about manipulating dictionaries, which was one of the difficult challenges. Although I was able to complete this one, with a decent amount of help, the final two challenges remain incomplete at this time as I am too scared to attempt them. I do not look forward to next weeks NCSS challenges, but general classwork I feel good about in terms of my understanding.