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2020/21’s First Year Students: Arduinos, Matlab and Java

  Introduction The 1st year programming courses in the Lassonde School at YorkU were revamped for the 2020/21 school year so that students could do hands-on lab activities from home.  The students took two programming classes: Matlab procedural programming in Fall 2020 Java object-oriented programming in Winter 2021 In both courses the students used Arduino-compatible […]

Simulating Micros from Command Line

Introduction Microchip’s MPLAB X permits simulation from the command line.  This is interesting from the perspective of teaching if we have automatically-graded programming assignments that take the student’s program and runs it against a simulated chip in an LMS like Moodle. Background I’m interested in how we can use the MDB in MPLAB X to […]

Recent interviews, podcasts and webcasts…

I had the privilege of participating in three interviews this summer. Podcast or Perish with Prof. Graham Cameron (epidsode link) The Montreal NewTech “Deep Dive” webcast with Simran Kanda (episode link) The Lassonde Engineering Society‘s inFlux podcast (episode Link) Update: here’s another podcast link for April 2021: Stark Talks (Lassonde Students): Spotify link,Youtube link,Apple Podcast […]

Privacy Smart Watches

So, you’re in the market for a “smart” watch that might do things like tell you where you are and what your heart rate is.  There are two issues with most smart watches that make them bad designs: lack on anonymity (privacy) and terrible battery life.  If you don’t want to compromise on those two […]

LPC802 & LPC804 Microcontroller lessons

These are copies of the lessons and labs that I developed for the LPC802 and LPC804 microcontrollers by NXP. These are the “student” versions and contain blanks in certain places on purpose. Course Outline (EECS 3215 Winter 2020) Introduction to the design of embedded systems using both hardware and software. Topics include microcontrollers; their architecture, […]

I’m a new student. Which computer should I get?

To new students (and their parents) who are looking to get a computer for the upcoming university school year, here are some tips (via my Twitter thread) Update (Nov 2020) Thinking of getting a new Mac in 2020 or 2021?  Think again.  Details below. How much? Get what you can afford.  Most people will spend […]

Disassembling in MPLABX & MCUXpresso

[to be updated] When you write programs in languages like C or C++ the programs get converted by the compiler tools into commands that the computer can read and understand.  Just before the compiler tools do that they convert your work into a sequence of commands into a language called Assembler. Back in the day […]

Moodle Scheduler

There are plenty of reasons to schedule interactions with students.  Office hours are one reason, and student presentations are another.  The Moodle scheduler allows you to set up these meetings, as shown in the figure below. once the student has looked at the schedule, she can then select a time slot.  Once she has “booked […]

Moodle tools: Glossary

What if you want a student to post material and have the rest of the class view and comment?  The Wiki module might be overkill, as is the Workshop module.  Maybe the Glossary module is light enough. Here, I’m setting it up to permit comments on entries. There are different styles of Glossaries… Dictionary, Encyclopedia, […]

At Home Electronics Lab Kits for Engineering

this is a work in progress… nothing is finalized and no decision made at this point.  Just doing a market survey for now… many people need to be consulted and this will have to be a joint decision… We’ll use an internal (to York) Teams page to flesh out the details. Key characteristics Price. (low […]