Whiz Kid Woes

During the last week of our summer vacations we worked quite a bit on the hardware of our project. Here are some pictures of the hardware modules that we’ve been working on:

The first two circuits above are a part of remote control circuitry which operates over RF. The real brain of the circuit is the SCTX2B IC in the fourth picture. We tried tapping into the IC pins, it works on active low and sending signals is a breeze. Finally the third circuit above is an 8-bit parallel port interface on a PCB, which we did in the first year of engineering. It has been practically redone and is enhanced on the circuit level. It’ll allow us to send signals through the parallel port to control the vehicle. We still have to mount the wireless camera over our vehicle and determine an optimum height for it. After that we’ll worry about protecting the camera from movement vibrations, we’ll try to minimize it as much as possible.

This is the second C/C++ assignment after the TSP problem which I really enjoyed doing! The goal was to create a program which would calculate both direct and systematic cyclic codes for (7,4). My program generated following results (for a fixed generator polynomial: x^3+x+1):

0000: V(x) = D: 0000000 S: 0000000
0001: V(x) = D: 0001101 S: 1010001
0010: V(x) = D: 0011010 S: 1110010
0011: V(x) = D: 0010111 S: 0100011
0100: V(x) = D: 0110100 S: 0110100
0101: V(x) = D: 0111001 S: 1100101
0110: V(x) = D: 0101110 S: 1000110
0111: V(x) = D: 0100011 S: 0010111
1000: V(x) = D: 1101000 S: 1101000
1001: V(x) = D: 1100101 S: 0111001
1010: V(x) = D: 1110010 S: 0011010
1011: V(x) = D: 1111111 S: 1001011
1100: V(x) = D: 1011100 S: 1011100
1101: V(x) = D: 1010001 S: 0001101
1110: V(x) = D: 1000110 S: 0101110
1111: V(x) = D: 1001011 S: 1111111

Where:
- V(x) is the generated vector (with data/check bits)
- ‘D’ denotes the vector contents for Direct Method and
- ‘S’ denotes the vector contents for the Systematic method

There wasn’t any substantial learning curve in coding this program but playing with modulo-2 was fun and the only tricky part was the repeated division in the Systematic method. I’ll upload the source files here after the assignment deadline is over (which is: July 29, 2006).