My Journal

[Kaustubh]

Hi I watched video on TED and this course seems very interesting. In order to motivate my self I am creating a journal and I hope to finish it without losing will power or focus.



Oct-12 2012.

visited website and ordered the Book on amazon.com.



Oct 14- 2012.

Read first chapter from online website. I had forgotten Most of Boolean algebra but a casual google search was all it took to refresh.

I started the hardware simulator and got stumped on Not gate. Had to do a google search for hint. I feel guilty for not discovering on my own but it was not obvious for first time.

HDL and Hardware simulator are very easy to use. downloaded notepad++ for editing. when there is an error, line number in message helps.

Built And, Not, Or, Xor, Mux, Dmux and Not 16 successfully. Once you build one chip rest are not that difficult. For Now,I will take a break, will try finish remaining chips later.

So far the book was very easy to read. All the Book demands  is from Reader is some effort and time.



Oct 14 2012 (evening)

Its weekend and I can not get over the excitement of building my own computer so started working again.

Finished all exercises in Chapter 1. it was an incredible feeling of accomplishment. Building a 16 Bit 4 Way Mux was tricky one. I first thought of writing everything from scratch but realized that authors have designed this course to challenge the creativity and not to become a grunt worker, so some "Lego Imagination" is needed here. connecting previously built 16 bit chip is the trick here.

you can read section A.5 of the apendix, if you do not know how to connect multi bit chips. if you are planning to write more that 10-15 lines of code there is a better way of solving the problem.

Rest of the exercises after that were pretty straight forward. A tip, if you are stuck, create truth table and  write the equation on a piece of paper. Patterns will seem to immerge which match equations of  previous chips.

None of the exercises need a lot of writing. only place where you have to write 16 lines of code is building some basic 16 bit chips, and that too, all lines are very similar.

So chapter 1 is done and I do not even have the book yet. It took about 7-8 hours to finish including exercises. I will probably get more time next weekend so might post an update at that time.