Sunday, November 26, 2006

My Grade 12 Computer Engineering

A little while ago i said i was going to let readers know what i am up to in my grade 12 Computer Engineering class (Note that i am in Grade 11 but have skipped a year in Computer Engineering and in computer science but unfortunately the class was canceled because of the lack of student interest). This year in computer engineering i am making a robot that works in a real world simulation modeled like a house fire. A candle in a a maze simulates the fire and the objective of the robot is to extinguish the flame. So far i have been learning C++ and am planning to transition to C so i can code the PIC chip we are using (PIC 16F877). I am using SDCC (Small Device C Compiler) to compile (it is of course Open-source). So far we have completed out main board, have a body complete, schematic design done (maybe a little tweaking yet) and i have a more to learn when it comes to programming (SDCC, C). I am managing a group with two other members. We hope to go to a competition later on in the year if we get the robot done in time. Anyways i have more homework to attend to. Thanks for reading.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

oh man, you are lucky. Wish they had taught us PICs at our school.

All I was taught at school was 3 lines of BASIC:

10 REM GOTO 20
20 PRINT "HELLO WORLD"
30 GOTO 20

Once you can program a PIC and get your hands on some EEPROMs you can do loads of cool stuff. I'm looking to get a SUNSpot... how cool would that be!

Collin said...

I learned BASIC last year...enough to program a some simple bots. I got to choose how i do my project this year and i instantly chose C for programming. I will get some pictures up of what we have done so far; it is not that big. I have been also learning about schematic design which is very interesting :) Could you tell more about EEPROMs and SUNSpots...i have never even heard of them. Thanks

Anonymous said...

Woa, now that's what I call cool! And all the while here I'm just usin MS Robotics Studio to program a factory made RCX, you get to design your own boards...

Rock on, and all the best for the competition..