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Microcontrollers Not Allowed – Trolling a college instructor

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Re: Microcontrollers Not Allowed – Trolling a college instructor

#41

Post by waterlesscloud »

obstinate wrote: post #30
EvanAnderson wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not caring about your GPA sounds like a great way to filter out companies that use bogus criteria as a way to filter prospective employees.

That's an option, but you're going to end up filtering out a lot of the best companies to work for if you go that route. I have personal knowledge that it's a factor at least at Google and Microsoft. As I understand it, Facebook and Twitter use it as well. All depends on what you value. Personally, it seems like getting a high GPA isn't very difficult, so why not do well in school to keep your opportunities as open a…

If you're not the sort of person overly concerned about GPA, then Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and Twitter may not be companies you want to work for anyway.

Re: Microcontrollers Not Allowed – Trolling a college instructor

#42

Post by GFK_of_xmaspast »

rasz_pl wrote: post #36
GFK_of_xmaspast wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning–Kruger_effect

Michael Dell, Bill Gates

There's a big difference between being a college drop-out and being a high school drop-out.

Re: Microcontrollers Not Allowed – Trolling a college instructor

#43

Post by jacquesm »

roberte3 wrote: post #18
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 wrot…

You got off lightly there, the instructor could have made you his assistant and farm out typing up all the course notes. At that speed that shouldn't have taken more than a few minutes of your time ;)

Re: Microcontrollers Not Allowed – Trolling a college instructor

#44

Post by jacquesm »

derekp7 wrote: post #32
cbhl wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It baffles me that there are college-level CS instructors who haven't heard of RPN before -- my high school CS teacher had us write an RPN calculator. That said, I can see an argument that an RPN calculator "trivializes" the assignment compared to an infix calculator, especially if the latter was supposed to do order-of-operations.

That's the kicker -- order of operations wasn't a requirement (and probably wouldn't have been allowed) either. Maybe I should have put a mode button on it so that you can select the desired mode. But that experience did teach me a valuable lesson -- always follow the specifications as close as possible, don't try to innovate (unless working on your own projects). And, I've learned to spot (and explain) contradictory…

In a way it is a pity that that was your take home lesson. You deserved an A++ and the take home should have been that going the extra mile gets rewarded.

Re: Microcontrollers Not Allowed – Trolling a college instructor

#45

Post by jacquesm »

letstryagain wrote: post #37
shabble wrote: post #2

Reminds me of the excellent EE-trolling magic circuits by Henryk Gasperowicz[1]. The number of things you could bury a little QFN MCU or similar in to play silly buggers with people is huge, especially if you have the luxury of them providing the 'support components'. [1] https://www.youtube.com/user/Fredzislaw100

I really want to know how he did this one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PC55DPXSpr4 I've been watching this video about once a month since 2013 and I still have no idea what's going on!

Looks deceive, those are no ordinary LEDs and that's not an ordinary switch. I have a good idea of how this was done but I may be off on the details. The switch contains a coil which is shorted using the switch itself which allows you to detect its presence or absence. That can be used to switch power to an RF oscillator which is connected to another coil, setting up a field over the green paper, relatively close to it. The LEDs contain a flip-flop + some rectification and a cap, each LED can be triggered 'on' or 'off' by completing the circuit between the legs (which otherwise function as antennae, that's why they are bent the way they are, that way they function as a dipole).

It's a really neat hack, the guy must have amazing skills if he really has that much hardware tucked away inside the guts of an LED, you'd basically have to hollow out the whole thing, then put an SMD LED at the tip of the housing and use the remainder of the space for the circuitry.

Time will tell how much of this was right if and when he reveals how this trick was done.

Re: Microcontrollers Not Allowed – Trolling a college instructor

#46

Post by derekp7 »

jacquesm wrote: post #44
derekp7 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the kicker -- order of operations wasn't a requirement (and probably wouldn't have been allowed) either. Maybe I should have put a mode button on it so that you can select the desired mode. But that experience did teach me a valuable lesson -- always follow the specifications as close as possible, don't try to innovate (unless working on your own projects). And, I've learned to spot (and explain) contradictory…

In a way it is a pity that that was your take home lesson. You deserved an A++ and the take home should have been that going the extra mile gets rewarded.

I did have a couple other classes that were a bit better -- Assembly (BAL on an IBM Mainframe), in which the instructor presented an award to me at the end of the semester, my very own pocket protector. And a C class I took, had a similar calculator project, so I ended up doing a parse tree with recursive evaluation in order to do handle operator precedence and parentheses. In that class, the instructor made handouts out of my homework assignment to go over as an example of good programming technique and an intro to algorithms for the rest of the class. Made me feel special at the time.

Re: Microcontrollers Not Allowed – Trolling a college instructor

#47

Post by noonespecial »

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…

I work in a printing plant that has a great deal of tech from the 80's and 90's. Nothing amuses me quite so much as pulling out a damaged obsolete board the size of a pizza box and replacing it with a micro-controller board the size of a playing card and a single screen's worth of code.

Re: Microcontrollers Not Allowed – Trolling a college instructor

#48

Post by vinceguidry »

letstryagain wrote: post #37
shabble wrote: post #2

Reminds me of the excellent EE-trolling magic circuits by Henryk Gasperowicz[1]. The number of things you could bury a little QFN MCU or similar in to play silly buggers with people is huge, especially if you have the luxury of them providing the 'support components'. [1] https://www.youtube.com/user/Fredzislaw100

I really want to know how he did this one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PC55DPXSpr4 I've been watching this video about once a month since 2013 and I still have no idea what's going on!

My first guess is that he's passing current over his skin, by touching a power source. The switch has a simple transmitter that turns it on and off.

Re: Microcontrollers Not Allowed – Trolling a college instructor

#49

Post by eru »

obstinate wrote: post #30
EvanAnderson wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not caring about your GPA sounds like a great way to filter out companies that use bogus criteria as a way to filter prospective employees.

That's an option, but you're going to end up filtering out a lot of the best companies to work for if you go that route. I have personal knowledge that it's a factor at least at Google and Microsoft. As I understand it, Facebook and Twitter use it as well. All depends on what you value. Personally, it seems like getting a high GPA isn't very difficult, so why not do well in school to keep your opportunities as open a…

> I have personal knowledge that it's a factor at least at Google and Microsoft. As I understand it, Facebook and Twitter use it as well.

Nah, even dropouts are welcome at Google. A high GPA is a point in your favour, but not the only thing that matters. (At least once you have some experience. I don't really know how we hire fresh graduates. But as far as I can tell we take everyone who has a pulse and can program.)

Re: Microcontrollers Not Allowed – Trolling a college instructor

#50

Post by makomk »

DanBC wrote: post #19
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.

If I recall the NSA leaks correctly, they already have.
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