Digital Electronics
In my senior year I had more space in my schedule, so I doubled up on my year-long PLTW classes. I took Digital Electronics in addition to Engineering Design and Development, plus I added AP Computer Science.
buzzer Project
Additional Information
For this project, we were tasked with building a circuit for teachers to use in a game where students would buzz in with the answers. Our circuit displays which students buzz, in first and the correct order in which the buzzer was clicked first. We used event detection inorder to trigger the results. We hit several speed bumps along the way but in the end, it was a huge success. We divided up the tasks to be efficient, I was tasked with designing the box that would hold the breadboard, switches, and LEDs. We all helped in the design of what the breadboard would look like and how we wanted it to work. I then spent a long time in Fusion 360 designing an intricate design. After the print was done I soldered the switches' LEDs to wires to connect to the breadboard.
Circuit building
Our final project of the first semester was to design and build a circuit that would display our birth date in a sequence. We had built a 555 timer earlier in the year and we just reused it to get our XYZ variables.
Engineering Notebook
I designed my circuit by creating truth tables, and k-mapping. After planning each individual section, I chose to use AOI only for this circuit because I had quite a few repeating combinations (XY, YZ, XZ) that I could reuse to shorten and simplify the circuit. I was also on a major time crunch as I had been sick with COVID-19 for the first half of the project, so I had a lot of catching up to do. This catching up ended up coming back to bite me later.
I created a prototype of my circuit in Multisim, which worked like a charm. But this wasn't the case when it came time to build the physical circuit. On the first build, it didn't work, and I couldn't find the issue for the life of me. So I took it apart, replaced all the parts, and tried again. On the second try, it still didn't work. So I took it apart again and looked for another issue, and I didn't find anything, so finally, on the third build, it still didn't work. There wasn't anything wrong; everything was exactly the same as it was in the multisim. I wanted to build it so badly, but the end of the semester was here, and I didn't have the time to finish it.
Reflection
It was very disappointing not being able to finish the project, but I will be attempting to finish it over the break even if it's not for a grade anymore. It's a challenge and I'm not going to walk away from it.