[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 […]
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. […]
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 […]
Unit testing is really important in general programming, but it's also really useful when creating interactive programming assignments. With Java, I like to use JUnit and with C I like to use the Unity unit tester. With Verilog it's actually really straight-forward to set up testing frameworks. In the EECS 2021 (Computer Organization) labs written […]
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) How much? Get what you can afford. Most people will spend between $500 and $2000 for a computer. $1000 - $1500 will get you a phenomenal machine that […]
EECS 1011 (and 1021) Lab Kit The EECS 1011 kit will be available for purchase from the York University Bookstore. The link for all lab kits at the Bookstore is here. As soon as it is available your course instructor will let you know. While the official kit is designed to work for most students, […]
Executive Summary The current portable air filter setup at CS Viamonde’s La Mosaïque (LAMO) [Viamonde is the French public school board in Toronto; LAMO is its largest elementary school] does not meet the minimum set of recommendations based on the latest scientific and engineering results related to the mainly aerosol nature of COVID19. Children in […]
August 2021 Background Here, we're going to apply ThrowTheSwitch's Unity unit test framework to C programs. The test framework is available on GitHub. Three files need to be downloaded from the GitHub. There are a few more files that need to be developed within VPL to make it work, and those are described below. We're […]
One of the places that Moodle falls down in is in supporting math assignments. It occurred to me that we could treat math assignments like we do programming assignments by extending the Virtual Programming Lab plugin for Moodle to support Maple. This doesn't replace existing products like the Maple / DigitalEd Möbius platform, nor does […]