Wednesday 5 January 2011

Exams coming soon

Apologies I haven't written here in ages. I thought it would be a good idea to do a Masters in Electronic Design Engineering. It has so far swallowed up all my free time. I've learned loads though. I've completed 2 Digital Designs, 1 for a simple sequence detect on a wire interface, the other on an auto-baud rate detector using Finite State Machines, Flow Charts, Timing diagrams and Design Flow Diagrams. It's been hard, it's been very hard. I've 3 more assignments due in at the moment. 1 of these has been running a lot later than I ever intended.

My exams start next week, Tuesday and Thursday and I really don't feel prepared enough to get the best grade that I think I can get. Best get the head down and sort that out.

The two modules I've undertaken are Digital Design and Software Engineering. For my software engineering module, we've just covered the basics of Object Orientated Programming with some Design and Architecture. I've completed a number of labs demonstrating the basic principles. It's the two main assignments that I'm proud of. The 1st one an FIR/IIR Filter which takes an input, applies a formula based on a text file input and outputs the various results into an output file. In effect the FIR filter removes any signal above 10KHz. Filter program is written in C++ using Microsoft Visual Studio 2008. See below for results. I think I saturated my IIR filter and the equation need some work, however I proved the filter works.
The top signal is the initial input signal, produced by 3 sine waves of varying frequencies. The second signal is the result of the FIR filter and the third wave is the result of the IIR Filter.


My 2nd program was written in Java. I basically had to write from scratch an emboss filter with a vertical edge detect filter and output the results. See below for initial image, emboss and vertical edge detect. I don't think my code was perfect, but it was close enough.