this week, I looked more into using Arduinos. The week prior, I still felt a little bit shaky with the physical circuits, but as I am now more familiar with it, I made a simple LED circuit first thing with no guidance. Code wise, I still needed to remember certain keywords and terms that are Arduino specific (eg: the displayWrite() function) however, each function isn’t too difficult to understand.
When trying to use a piezo speaker, I had a few errors, thankfully these were mostly simple fixes such as forgetting a semi-colon or mistyping a word. I also got better at spotting my own errors and fixing them, which I was happy about. The piezo speaker was a bit fiddly, but it was really fun testing out the music it could reproduce. When trying to use two piezo speakers, I kept getting mixed up with which parts of my code I needed to reuse and which parts need a second variable, but otherwise it went pretty smoothly.
On Wednesday, I had two lectures, the first of being about Computing history. While there were some topics that were already mentioned that I knew of, such as Ada Lovelace and the story of the jacquard loom, however I learnt a lot at this first lecture. For instance, I never realised that Atari made early video games as a form of military training – I find it useful in some ways as it doesn’t directly hurt people, however as a form of military training it is teaching people how to kill. It’s a bit of a grey area of history but it was interesting to learn about.
In this talk, there were many mentions on how computer science was, in the early stages, an act of counterculture and activism. I find it a bit ironic how back then computers were against modern culture, when nowadays I’d consider counterculture to be those who don’t use technology,
During my second lecture, I really enjoyed the content of it, however it was more within the grasp of what I already knew so it was building on my current knowledge. Algorithmic oppression was discussed, and how anyone outside of the perceived internet norm (white, cisgender, heterosexual man) are seen as an ‘other’ in contrast. This was something I already understood prior, but the deeper exploration on how being ‘colourblind’ to race is actually less beneficial for fighting for the positive representation of others was insightful to listen to.
On Thursday, we look at how to organise code in C++, I never knew that struct existed as a concept in programming, but it was very understandable to me and I was glad I got a chance to test it in my code
struct Note {
int melody;
int duration;
};
constexpr Note NewMelody[20] = {
// put note, duration
// –> like this {NOTE_A1, 1000},
{NOTE_F3, 1000},
{NOTE_E3, 1000},
{0, 1000},
…
}
I am quite behind on my documentation for my machine learning since I lost my original copy, I am trying to work on it but I find it difficult. Thankfully, I’ve been finding some good sources on the internet to help explain concepts to me better so that I can write why they are important, as well as using Phind as a tool for further explanation.