Good News!!!

This week has been a very tough week but it ended up being one of my best weeks so far. I had a practical for three of my 5 modules and for each practical I had to do theoretical preparation. By far the hardest part of a practical is the theoretical preparation. If you end up doing your calculation and circuit design on the same day as the practical, then you are done for. I know that this is going to sound bad but that is what I did this week, I pretty much did my practical preparation on the day of practical. All of those days ended up being long and tiring. I had to do it because most of my time went into fixing and doing preparation for my E-Design demo that I had to do on Thursday. This was more important than all of my other practicals.

So for this weeks E-Design we had to create a remote for our previously built gate. The lecturer gave us two buttons, a Renesas G12 and a programmer to program the G12. They also gave us an infrared LED and a receiver which we had to connect to the G14, the main controller of the gate. Each of us were given a hexadecimal address for our specific remotes so that our remotes doesn't open other students gates.

We had to send information from our remote to the gate using Manchester coding. The information had to be sent in binary and had to be decoded at the gate. The three instructions that we had to send was open, close and stop. One button opened the gate and the other button closed the gate and if both buttons were pressed at the same time then the gate had to stop.

Building and coding the remote was quite easy but the most challenging part was to decode the information that was sent. So I sampled the information for decoding using a timer and an edge triggered pin. If the pin was triggered the timer had to start and only read information from the receiver at an interval of 889 micro seconds.

Everything worked fine at the end of the day and I managed to get all of my marks for the demo that day. This was my first successful demo, all the other demos had some sort of problem on the day of the demo.


The good news is that I now have a much better chance of passing this module which had me all negative and sleep deprived.  

Before I forget, I just want to mention that I took part in a table tennis tournament this weekend and I made it all the way to the semi-final. I must say, best week so far.