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.

Another milestone today: eight hundred total posts since I started this more than two years ago, and including the entries put up in the version that is “child safe” so to speak, that one beginning just four months ago.

There are some points to ponder about the thousand-odd days journey, but I’ll reserve that for a landmark that I can share with my charges, of which, if I’m not mistaken, one is just a week and a day away.

So where was I? Ah, the two-hour session for the fifth week of classes for the Interfacing Computer Systems students.

They finally started on the next experiment that I gave them the week before, which is to modify the visual basic program and the circuit that they made with the light emitting diodes so that it would now work on a conventional seven- segment display component.

The first part of the period was used in looking for the components, of which we could only find one.

There was actually another one available, but it was two-digit. So for us to use that, we first had to get a new data sheet for its pin assignments.

Second, it had to be soldered out of the printed circuit board it was on.

I told the second group (I decided on the random grouping again, this time alternating assignments based on the order that the students arrived in class) that if they could not use that one, they would have to share hardware and just come up with their own group software instead.

They were persistent in searching though, because they knew that they had just used those in switching theory lab last term. But it was their teacher in that class who bought them, and I didn’t know if it was reimbursed or out of his own pocket, and thus that he brought them home after use.

I also had to dissuade the students from worrying about the decimal point display and its pin assignment, since it had no bearing on their expected output.

In the process of searching, we also found a microprocessor kit that they could now use in their computer circuit fundamentals lab, which my computer science co-teacher, Christine, is handling.

I am also now thinking of limiting the groupings further, despite the lack of resources, because I am not sure that some students are acclimated with both the hardware and the software part of the subject, but are concentrating on what they already know.

Session 801 is de-soldered at this point. Class dismissed.