EECS 2021 Lab Kit The EECS 2021 lab requires you to have both (1) the Grove board with an ATMEGA328P chip on it (you got it as a part of the EECS 1011/21 lab kit last year), as well as (2) a Snap programmer. The Grove kit (officially called the "Grove Beginner Kit for Arduino") […]
It's Oct 8, 2021. Last week I heard from my Vice Dean of the plan to go back to in-person teaching in January, 2022.[1] I believe that this is potentially a premature decision as York University appears to have ignored deficiencies in its measures to fight COVID. These include a vaccination documentation system that may […]
The CS Viamonde school board provided a response about the status of ventilation and air filtering at the La Mosaïque elementary school in the east end of Toronto on August 24, 2021. The letter is included at the bottom of this blog post Executive Summary Air filtering is vital to keep our kids safe in […]
Introduction In YorkU's EECS Department, we have access to NGSPICE on our department's Linux machines (via RemoteLab). NGSPICE is yet another variation on the venerable SPICE circuit simulator. Our the University's Moodle system, eClass, we have access to Virtual Programming Lab, a framework for making interactive exercises for students. It is typically used with programming […]
Executive Summary The current portable air filter setup at CS Viamonde’s La Mosaïque (LAMO) [Viamonde is the French public school board in Toronto; LAMO is its largest elementary school] does not meet the minimum set of recommendations based on the latest scientific and engineering results related to the mainly aerosol nature of COVID19. Children in […]
Introduction COVID has changed everything about campus life. In order to maximize the safety of students, staff and faculty at York University, we, as a community, need to focus on multiple factors, including: Vaccinations Ventilation (and air filtering) Masking Progressive work / study policies Last week, our university partially caved to pressure from the YorkU […]
August 2021 Background Here, we're going to apply ThrowTheSwitch's Unity unit test framework to C programs. The test framework is available on GitHub. Three files need to be downloaded from the GitHub. There are a few more files that need to be developed within VPL to make it work, and those are described below. We're […]
One of the places that Moodle falls down in is in supporting math assignments. It occurred to me that we could treat math assignments like we do programming assignments by extending the Virtual Programming Lab plugin for Moodle to support Maple. This doesn't replace existing products like the Maple / DigitalEd Möbius platform, nor does […]
Sometimes you need to go beyond the default settings in VPL. That means creating a custom "run" and "evaluate" setup. Here, I'll simplify a great example by Dominique Tiebaut, Emeritus prof at Smith College, written for an assignment in C. (archive) We'll check a "hello world" example in C, but won't use the default evaluate.cases […]
This page is about programming ATMEGA328 chips, like the one found on the Arduino UNO, using modern (post 2015) tools like MPLAB X and the Snap or PICKit4 debuggers. As of July 2021 there is a little hiccup in how to do this. Hopefully in the future Microchip will fix the issue and render this […]