TKJ Electronics

I haven’t made any posts in a long time, and that’s because of school, homework and work.
But yesterday and today I have time off from school, so I thought it would be nice to follow a first semester class on Aarhus University in Herning; read more about AU-HIH here

 
I contacted one of the counselors there, Thomas, who was a very friendly man, and was fast to arrange this meeting. So yesterday I took the train from Holstebro to Birk Centerpark and walked with all the students to the school – pretty nice feeling to be “one of them”.
At the school I found the class I was supposed to follow this day, and found me a place to sit. All the teaching are done in English, so I looked forward to see how that would go.
The first two lessons was called “Basic Software Development”, and we worked with Eclipse and C++, where we made some functions, if-statements and for loops. Remember, this is only a first semester class – they will get more advanced over time!

The second two lessons to follow was called “Digital Design”, and I really liked those lessons. We learned about decimal to binary conversion, decimal to octal, decimal to hex and opposite – of course the mathematical way. Then we also learned to to add and substract in binary!
That was 4 hours, and then I had my lunch and went to the electronics lab as the class were going to experiment with AND, NOR and NAND gates on their breadboard. This was a great task, and I got to help some of the students too 🙂
As the last lesson this day, we was introduced to OrCAD, and how simulation works. We tried putting a schematic together with 4 resistors, and then OrCAD simulated the different voltages and power comsumption.

That was the day for the students, but not for me! I was going to meet Thomas, the EDE Counselor (EDE meens Electronics Design Engineer), and have a chat about the study enviroment, the lessons, and how it all works. But not least have a talk about FPGA’s and VHDL.
We sat in Electronics LAB from about 3PM till 10PM, chatting, discussing and playing with FPGA’s. I learned a lot, especially the VHDL language, which is used to program the FPGA chips.
I made a project with the 4 seven segments on my Basys2 board, so I could show numbers on that – but I’ll talk about that in another post in here.
So to end this day we drove to Mac Donals to have meal, and then I took the train back to Holstebro.

 
It was a very nice and interesting day, and I thanks the class, the teachers and Thomas, for letting me try this. I’m looking forward to join you all the time in a couple of years!
Thank you…

 
Thomas