CTAM: Count to a million and be the first forum to do it (Part 9)

96,327 might go to sleep now...

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Same here actually, good night!

Oh cool. Yup, the first year at my school to be able to do so (which was lucky but the teacher didn't really know everything that was going on as it was their first time teaching CompSci at GCSE Wow! Yeah, at least you have ICT
What subjects did you take, if you don't mind me asking?

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Excellent! We did do a small amount on gates in A Level Physics (I think), but we didn't have any Engineering or Computer Science GCSE's or A Levels. Most of my knowledge from gates came from the 1st and 2nd years of university.

That's excellent to hear, and although 16 bytes isn't much, it's something!

We did about semiconductors, transistors and the like in the 1st and 2nd years of university, and it was good stuff to learn about Yep, if you do Computer Science at university, you'll more than likely come across these things throughout your course

We've built all sorts of things through our course. In the first year, as part of a group project, we had to make something that would launch an egg a distance of at least 15m, without the egg breaking. Bit of a weird task, but hey ho! In the 2nd year, we did more Electronics based tasks, including making a BCD to 7 segment decoder (we couldn't use an off-the-shelf solution), and using an Arduino (a microcontroller that runs certain programs) for programming things, including a temperature and humidity sensor. (Arduinos can actually be used for more complicated things, as myself and one of my friends decided to take on a personal project, by building an FM Boombox style radio, which all used Arduino components. It also has a Bluetooth mode, and an AUX IN mode.)

Third year (which was this year) we did a lot of programming, programming in C and in VHDL. We also had final year projects to deal with.

All in all, very interesting!

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For a-level? Maths, ict and film. Did film because my mates were doing it so why not it's been pretty fun actually

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Wow seems like your course has covered a lot of things lol about the egg thing, did you manage to do it? And what's a BCD? I've done some binary encoding and decoding (necessary to make a calculator) is it to do with that? Never heard of VHDL but I know I'll be working in C if i go to uni

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Yup. Cool subjects! Haha, well at least you've enjoyed it
Sorry if you've already said, are you planning on doing computing at university?

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Yep, and surprisingly, the egg actually managed to stay intact during both demo runs that we had to give. Amazing!

A BCD is a binary coded decimal - so a binary input which had to be decoded to show the sum of the inputs on the 7 segment display.
So obviously, the 4 inputs would represent 8, 4, 2 and 1 respectively (as it is binary) and depending on what input buttons you pressed, the sum of these inputs would show on the 7 segment (unless the sum was greater than 9, in which case it would either show E for error, or blank. I can't remember which it was).

VHDL is a special programming type which (I think?) is mostly used in digital electronics. C is much more common.

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