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Lab Kit details for EECS 1011/1021

[Updated March 2024] EECS 1011 (and 1021) Lab Kit The EECS 1011 kit is 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 […]

Open letter about COVID-related air quality in an elementary school

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 […]

VPL: Simple C Assignment with Unit Testing

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 […]

VPL: Basic Custom Evaluation Example

Sometimes you need to go beyond the default settings in VPL. That means creating a custom "run" and "evaluate" setup. Here, I'll simplify a great example by Dominique Tiebaut, Emeritus prof at Smith College, written for an assignment in C. (archive) We'll check a "hello world" example in C, but won't use the default evaluate.cases […]

Debuggers, MPLAB X and the Arduino

This page is about programming ATMEGA328 chips, like the one found on the Arduino UNO, using modern (post 2015) tools like MPLAB X and the Snap or PICKit4 debuggers. As of July 2021 there is a little hiccup in how to do this. Hopefully in the future Microchip will fix the issue and render this […]

Pedagogy in a Pandemic: Teaching without Exams

This is the first semester that I've taught 100% online.  The Fall 2020 lockdown and the YorkU strike in 2018 gave me a taste of what it would be like and alerted me to the need for restructuring of my classes in order to make them more favourable to learning.  During the pandemic, students are struggling but […]

Modifying an Arduino for MPLAB X

To allow the UNO to be programmed by the PICKit 4 via the ICSP header (circled in blue, below), we need to cut the reset signal trace that links the '328P processor to the USB Bridging chip that is also found on the UNO, the MEGA16U2. There are also two other wires that we won't […]

2020/21's First Year Students: Arduinos, Matlab and Java

Introduction The 1st year programming courses in the Lassonde School at YorkU were revamped for the 2020/21 school year so that students could do hands-on lab activities from home.  The students took two programming classes: Matlab procedural programming in Fall 2020 Java object-oriented programming in Winter 2021 In both courses the students used Arduino-compatible hardware […]

“Home Security and Automation” Project Description

[What the project is to achieve, a half to one page. Please describe the educational component of the project.] Home security projects are relatively common for engineering and computer science students.  They typically focus on a superficial and limited technical implementation. The objective of this project is to learn how to design a system that […]

A Project to Compare C and C++

I want to spend my sabbatical year re-thinking my perspective on C++ and Assembler and how to teach engineering and computer science material using those two languages. To keep myself focused I'll need a target application, ideally with hardware.  In fact, two applications would be ideal: Controlling chip heat Alarm system The first application would […]