Micro-Computers

Could you use a "smarter" piece of lab equipment? Perhaps Clark Thompson or Ken Carlock can help you improve your data collection and analysis techniques.

Thompson and Carlock teach CS151B, a laboratory course on microprofessor interfacing. About sixty students complete this course each quarter. Many of them would like to supplement their lab work with real-world experience.

The Computer Science Division offers course credit for student projects. Unfortunately, good project proposals are few and far between. It is not that the students are not talented. They merely have little contact with the application areas.

This campus' laboratories should provide many opportunities for student projects. It is only a lack of comuniaction that prevents the students, the CS151B instructors, and perhaps you from working together.

An apporpirate project would be a modification to an existing mini-or micro-computer system. The changes could involve software and/or hardware. For example, a student could connect a new data-collection device (say a temperature sensor) to your computer, then develop the software to analyze the data.

It is also possible that a student could build a small system from scratch if its capabilities were modest and carefully delineated.

The scale of a project is limited by the amount of available time. A student is generally able to put in ten or fifteen hours a week over a period of one two three academic quarters. Three-quarter projects are rather rate, since many students do not take the microprocessor interfacing course until their Senior year.

The cost of the hardware must be borne by you, the edxperimenter. The Computer Science Division will provide a modest amount of support for developmental tools and equipment, such as oscillocops and PROM programmers.