6.091
29 January 2009 | Jason
Crossing Mass Ave, passing the Wright Brothers Wind Tunnel, entering building 34, and entering my class on the third level, I take a seat next to Yuzhi for the first class. I listen to the professor begin to talk about what we will be doing in the class and do a quick explanation of resistors and circuits. We finish the first class and some of us head to lab. We learn how to use multimeters, scopes, signal generators, and soldering irons. Each of us even was allowed to keep a multimeter for ourselves. The next time we have class we learn about BJTs and op amps. The LA had fun making fun of the girl next to me because she was a bio major from Wellesley. She also happened to blow an op amp, which apparently does not happen very often. The op amps let us do fun things like integrate signals and amplify signals.
The third class we play with timers to do things like turn off an LED after a calculated time. The professor also plugged in a capacitor the wrong way into a breadboard. Although we were prepared for it, the sound was still surprisingly loud from such a small object. Charging a polarized capacitor the wrong way will quickly make it explode. The fourth class we learned about digital circuits and how to use gates to do boolean algebra. We also moved from the small lab we were in to the 6.111 lab with their larger, better equipment.
For the last class, we only made one final circuit. It was a digital lock where depending on the sequence the switches were depressed, the LED would turn on. We used a combination of NAND gates, AND gates, and shift registers to make the circuit. It took me almost the full four hours to make the circuit because first, I wanted to make the wires look nice, and second, because the LAs would refuse to help if the wires were not multiple colours. We got to take this circuit home to be able to show off. I’m quite glad I made it pretty.
Be anal about the appearance of things you can bring home to show off. Pretty things are more fun to present.
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