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The students are making good progress learning C on the Junebug. Today I am changing the connectors on old PC speakers so they can be used with outside two pins on the connector at the USB end of the Junebug. I am going to use a resistor to limit the current to about 20 ma as measured with meter. That will allow the speakers to be used with one output pin or as a bridged setup. Last year we had 3 students working with speakers and the sound was horrid. I may add a few ohms for my sanity. ...

The projector came in and I rearranged the room again. The good news is that it is a 1024x768 resolution unit. I scrounged around and found a 6 or 8 foot projection screen.

For the first time I can let the students watch me demo code. I plan to use a small USB cam to show the Junebug in action as I step through code.

It has been a bit of a battle to get enough Junebugs built and running. I started on a batch of 6 prior to school starting. 4 of the 6 came out OK....

Earlier we studied computer basics such as memory and ports.

We started programing this week. everyone turned on then blinked the first LED using the Junebug tutor. Thanks Bill!

We spent about a half hour learning about simple multiplexing and charlieplexing. I provided work sheets for charlieplexing LED's with 3,4, and 5 lines.

I introduced arrays and provided two constant arrays that held TRISA and LATA values for lighting the charlieplexed Junebug...

Most of what we covered to date:

• binary, hex, 2's compliment, base conversions, BCD, ASCII
• logic gates, but not simplification
• Ohm Law and Power equations
• resistor series and parallel, as pullups and current limiting
• LED's and how to calculate a limit resistor for one.
• A brief view of how a computer works including ALU, buses, memory types & org, config mem
• PIC port registers, PORT and TRIS

We watched parts of 2057 on Friday and will watch a bit more on Monday.
...

To my surprise and dismay I was gifted with a room about half again as large as the classroom I was using. It is a great space but I had already spent time getting the previous room ready.

It is half of a double wide trailer setup for use as overflow classrooms in the 80's and 90's.

It has tile floors (good for electronics) and running water (good for etching). There are several banks of kitchen like cabinets. The top units have been overloaded and are starting...