I’ve not posted much recently, but now the summer is here my workload eases off a bit, and I can find a little more time for this site. I have still been writing software, but a lot of it hasn’t been demos; I’ve spent quite a bit of time on an automatic marking and feedback generating system, which is saving me a lot of time. I get very little time to mark and provide feedback on nearly 500 scripts at the end of the academic year, and anything that I can prepare in advance that can save me some time during the marking weeks is very useful.
I’ve been doing a bit of bug-fixing and adding new features to some of the existing programs as well, in particular a new mode for the digital simulator program that I did for a few “widening participation” sessions. The problem – how you give a classful of 14 year-olds a hands-on impression of what electronic students study, when I can’t assume that any of them even know what voltage is, and I’ve only got an hour. Solution: teach them binary, then simple logic, and get them to simulate a circuit (one of the advantages of having a really easy-to-use simulator) and then wire something up on a set of digital logic boards and see it working.
Perhaps a little ambitious for an hour, but it seemed to work – and being able to use the digital demo on an interactive whiteboard was a lot of fun for me. You can’t right-click on an interactive whiteboard, so that required a new feature, and there were a few more preset included of really simple circuits for them.
Anyway, the two next programs scheduled for putting up here will be a flow and congestion control demo (I’m getting this ready for a summer school on satellite communications that I’m going to next month), and a new audio network analyser program – however that’s not a Silverlight demo, it’s a standalone C# program, using the NAudio library. That one’s finished really, I just need to document it a bit better and I can put it up here. Watch this space…