Semester 2, Part III - Update!

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I know these posts are totally out of order but I thought it would be appropriate to post an update with how my semester is going so far. Currently we’re in the first week of our mid-sem break after a very long and hectic first-half of semester 2 which involved a lot of programming in C, analogue circuit design and last minute assignments (and an absolutely incredible engineering revue – the show was a huge success!!). So I'm going to just summarise my semester so far, and hopefully give you an insight on how Part III compsys is going so far for me!

COMPSYS301 is our big project paper for the semester and we’re working in groups of four to program a robot to find the shortest path out of a maze (which is projected onto the ground). So far, we’ve had to design a light sensing circuit and have been told that it’s the last time that we will get the chance to design our own PCBs! (unless you choose to do more electrical-ish stuff next year, that is). We’re using a PSoC 5LP to program our robot and the more we do with it, the more I want to buy one for myself! We’ve gotten the chance to learn so many new things and also learn more about things we’ve dealt with in the past such as using a PWM, ADC, interrupts and timers.

In the last week of the first half of the semester, we had an assignment due for COMPSYS303. This paper is all about embedded systems and the first assignment for this paper, we had to design a traffic light controller using a DE2 board in teams of two. It was quite a challenge, but we did get there in the end. This was the fourth team project we’ve had this year, and I think it’s really cool that compsys lets us work in groups for so many different things. It really helps us practice for the real world- where I know we won’t always get the chance to work alone. 

A paper where we are able to work alone is COMPSYS304. This paper is all about computer architecture and we’ve had one assignment for it so far, it involves understanding and writing instructions with MIPS architecture. It’s one of those things that you might not understand the first time you learn about it in class, but after spending some extra time going over the concepts its actually quite interesting and it’s cool to be able to say you can understand what all those of numbers with dollar signs mean.

ELECTENG303 is the fourth paper I’m taking this semester and is compulsory for all compsys and electrical students. It’s all about systems and control, and builds upon the knowledge we learnt in ENGSCI313 last semester and we learn to apply it to real life scenarios. 

So, for now I’m gonna leave it here. I’ll be making separate posts for some of our papers with much more detail so stay tuned if you're interested!


-Salina 🌻 

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