[work in progress, Summer 2023] In the Winter of 2022 and 2023 we used Firmata and Firmata4j in the EECS 1021 class. It provides a great deal of functionality while also allowing students to focus on the development of the client on the computer rather than both the client and the Arduino server code. At […]
On March 28 I read of an agenda item, entitled "Repealing the 'Entering PEO Office Protocols', in the upcoming 556th Meeting of the Council of Professional Engineers Ontario, Friday March 31, 2023. Prepared by Mr. Gregory Wowchuk and seconded by Mr. Royden Fraser, two highly placed PEO Council members, it appeared to be an attempt […]
It's March, 2023. Most of the world has "moved on from COVID" and stopped wearing masks. Here at York University, the YUScreen system was dropped last month and many of the door signs about COVID have been removed. But the fact remains that there are still plenty of reasons to wear a mask* in public. […]
The VPL server in the YorkU EECS department was recently updated (2022/23). This had a small impact on existing VPL scripts. With Java, any script that uses JUnit needs to have its vpl_run.sh and vpl_evaluate.sh scripts updated. Here, I have the run script do the JUnit test directly. The evaluate script does JUnit through the […]
It's Fall 2022 and the masks are off. Well, officially, masking is a "personal choice". Leadership has dropped the COVID ball and is hoping that nobody is going to pick it up again. So what's left to do? Continue to mask, provide alternatives for everyone that don't require in-person gathering (classes, labs, meetings), get vaccinated […]
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). This is an update to earlier posts in 2021 and 2020. I'm writing this from the perspective of a professor that teaches first year and second year programming […]
Hello students, It's August 30, 2022 and we'll be starting class in just over a week. The eClass page will be available shortly, but I wanted to reach out to let you know what we have planned. The topics The EECS 2021 course is about how microprocessors work. We will examine both the hardware and […]
This class has run successfully for two years as a remote course. We redesigned the material and delivery for the pandemic and the formula that we've come up with works really, really well. So, while this course is officially an in-person course for 2022, there are no in-person tests, nor is there a requirement to […]
In the previous post I showed you how to use VPL and simAVR together to write a basic activity that would test to see if a student could change or assign the value of a register in the simulated microcontroller using the C programming language. While it was the most straight-forward way that I could […]
In Computer Architecture classes or Embedded Systems classes, it can be really useful to allow for students to be graded on assignments that allow them to interactively explore the inner workings of a microprocessor. One way is to have the students create programs in a hardware description language like Verilog or VHDL. Another way is […]