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Microcontrollers Not Allowed – Trolling a college instructor

ultrakeet.com.au

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Re: Microcontrollers Not Allowed – Trolling a college instructor

#11

Post by sgt »

jacquesm wrote: post #3

In the age of 4.5 V 'flat' batteries we did something similar, put an AC generator and another battery inside. (simple sine wave oscillator coupled to a cheap small transformer salvaged from a transistor radio). Watch the local electronics wizz tear their hair out in bafflement how an empty battery (according to the DC volt meter) can power a lamp. Why resort to 4 letter words if you can mess with the laws of physics…

I'd love to an electronics related prank in 2015. Just before I went on christmas holiday, I inserted a snippet of JavaScript into our web-based IDE (used by our developers) that flipped images upside down for a few seconds now and then. Their first reactions - this must be a browser issue. Another suspected an issue with the latest OS update.

Re: Microcontrollers Not Allowed – Trolling a college instructor

#12

Post by ChuckMcM »

Generally if you can pull that off you are way past the course material :-) I had a FORTRAN problem which asked to print the current bowling score given a series of numbers between 0 and 10 (number of pins knocked down) and I had it print out spares as '/' and strikes as 'X' and it didn't print the actual score until you didn't get a strike (as is the custom on bowling.) and the TA complained. (the assignment was to print out the score every frame) but the professor was cool about it and had a nice chuckle so I did get full marks.

It is generally a sign of how good the faculty are at an institution based on how they respond to this sort of exceptionalism.

Re: Microcontrollers Not Allowed – Trolling a college instructor

#13

Post by derekp7 »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #12

Generally if you can pull that off you are way past the course material :-) I had a FORTRAN problem which asked to print the current bowling score given a series of numbers between 0 and 10 (number of pins knocked down) and I had it print out spares as '/' and strikes as 'X' and it didn't print the actual score until you didn't get a strike (as is the custom on bowling.) and the TA complained. (the assignment was to…

I had a similar experience with a Visual Basic class at community college (required credit for the degree at the time). Since the class was kind of boring (was already a C programmer, Basic was way in my past at that point), I wanted to make the projects more interesting. So, on a calculator project, we were to make a hand-held calculator emulator. I asked if there were any restrictions on the type of calculator, and was told no -- any one. So I emulated an HP RPN style calculator. But since the instructor never heard of RPN before, and despite an introduction screen explaining it, he still failed the assignment.

Re: Microcontrollers Not Allowed – Trolling a college instructor

#14

Post by TheLoneWolfling »

kelvin0 wrote: post #9
sepetoner wrote: post #8

Relatively new EE here with a quick question. You can, technically, make a system with the same output (spelling penis, etc.), without a microcontroller, correct? With the proper frequency dividers, timers, and logic gates? Or am I wrong here?

Of course, but then the instructor would have noticed the extra hardware and it would have ruined the fun ...

Expert mode:

Make the discrete-component circuit to do this inside the logic gate.

(Especially hard as there are components that physically cannot be made small enough (large caps / inductors, etc))

Re: Microcontrollers Not Allowed – Trolling a college instructor

#15

Post by shawnz »

sepetoner wrote: post #8

Relatively new EE here with a quick question. You can, technically, make a system with the same output (spelling penis, etc.), without a microcontroller, correct? With the proper frequency dividers, timers, and logic gates? Or am I wrong here?

You could reproduce the whole microcontroller with just those things, if you wanted. So inherently the answer is yes. If you mean to ask if it can be done without software, the answer is still yes.

Re: Microcontrollers Not Allowed – Trolling a college instructor

#16

Post by ekimekim »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #12

Generally if you can pull that off you are way past the course material :-) I had a FORTRAN problem which asked to print the current bowling score given a series of numbers between 0 and 10 (number of pins knocked down) and I had it print out spares as '/' and strikes as 'X' and it didn't print the actual score until you didn't get a strike (as is the custom on bowling.) and the TA complained. (the assignment was to…

Back in 2nd year CS we were tasked with making a simple terminal minesweeper game. It would print the whole board state after each move and read coords from stdin to know what square was picked.

I wanted to make it a proper GUI-style board with arrow key movement, randomised mines (the assignment tasked us with reading mine locations from stdin at the start), auto-expanding zeros, varying board sizes...so I did.

However, I knew the assignment would be marked on automated test results. I wanted to show off, but still pass the auto-tests. So I made it ask for game "mode" at the start, implementing both the requested behavior and my desired behavior. But if stdin wasn't a tty, it just did the requested behaviour without asking, thus foiling the tests.

Re: Microcontrollers Not Allowed – Trolling a college instructor

#17

Post by sliverstorm »

sgt wrote: post #11
jacquesm wrote: post #3

In the age of 4.5 V 'flat' batteries we did something similar, put an AC generator and another battery inside. (simple sine wave oscillator coupled to a cheap small transformer salvaged from a transistor radio). Watch the local electronics wizz tear their hair out in bafflement how an empty battery (according to the DC volt meter) can power a lamp. Why resort to 4 letter words if you can mess with the laws of physics…

I'd love to an electronics related prank in 2015. Just before I went on christmas holiday, I inserted a snippet of JavaScript into our web-based IDE (used by our developers) that flipped images upside down for a few seconds now and then. Their first reactions - this must be a browser issue. Another suspected an issue with the latest OS update.

I never found those quite as fun.

    "Something is misbehaving, this is annoying!"
vs.

    "This is literally impossible. How is this happening!?"

Re: Microcontrollers Not Allowed – Trolling a college instructor

#18

Post by roberte3 »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #12

Generally if you can pull that off you are way past the course material :-) I had a FORTRAN problem which asked to print the current bowling score given a series of numbers between 0 and 10 (number of pins knocked down) and I had it print out spares as '/' and strikes as 'X' and it didn't print the actual score until you didn't get a strike (as is the custom on bowling.) and the TA complained. (the assignment was to…

In college, I had to take a 1-credit hour lab course on MS-Office so that I could take an accounting class I wanted.

The first lab featured a typing test app where you had to be able to type 40wpm or they made you drop the class. The app was a DOS app that a) made you type a certain bit of unchanging text every time for the test, and if you finished it type it again until you made a certain number of mistakes.

I wrote a borland basic TSR that pretended to be a keyboard, and typed in the corpus repeatedly.

The instructor apologized repeatedly for making me take the class, and looked utterly terrified of me for the rest of the semester after receiving my 300,000wpm test result.

Re: Microcontrollers Not Allowed – Trolling a college instructor

#19

Post by DanBC »

userbinator wrote: post #4

Too bad the font isn't exactly the same as the real part (look at the 6, 7, and 9 near the end of the video), or maybe that was intentional... One thing that still amazes people today is just how tiny a component can be, and yet provide so much functionality. I've been working with electronics for many years and the feeling still doesn't go away. The die of that microcontroller is even smaller than the package, and i…

The various devices that sit between a computer and a USB keyboard to record the keystrokes are huge compared to how small they could be.

http://www.keyghost.com/photos.htm

A well funded TLA could make these really hard to find.

Re: Microcontrollers Not Allowed – Trolling a college instructor

#20

Post by dripton »

Beautiful. If I were teaching the class, you'd get the A and I'd remember when it was time to write recommendations. But I remember some professors who might have failed a student for pulling something like that. Or even accused him of cheating, for "sneaking in an unapproved piece of rogue equipment." You need to pick your spots.
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