turing and engineering assignment

[brianrood]

Hey, I have to do a final ISU for my computer engineering class, and I have to use turing and then using the parallel port and a breadboard I have to create something like working stop lights or a joystick or something of that sort, and I was wondering if anyone had any cool Ideas I could whip up quick or if n e 1 could direct me to a website with a bunch of ideas for projects, you can e-mail me , or reply here and I will check it.
Thanks,
brianrood

[TheZsterBunny]

Hrm. you could have a sort of 'bar meter' monitoring something

i haven't taken compeng, but maybe you could have a motor spinning, lights static around it, and the speed of the motor reflected by number of lights.

simpleish to do in turing (save the motor part -- no ideas), but the lights would look good there.


or you could speak to a tech teacher, dig up an old cannon project, and turn it into a 'fusion pulse laser cannon' by adding some leds to simulate charging and firing of the weapon. that could either be really cool or really cheezy.

good luck!

--edit--
heck, if you felt like it, you could do a binary clock. that'd be very cool.

-Z

[scottyrush13]

a binary clock eh ? thats not a half bad idea

you should do it lol

sounds pretty neat

[brianrood]

How would I go about doing a bimnary clock at all? Thats sounds totally messed up LoL.... and what would I use for outside just like a normal clock and make a turing program using binary numbers to keep with the time?

[Tony]

Think Geek

[brianrood]

Thank you very much I think I am going to try and get thios binary clock to work, I just need a piece of cardboard, and sum led's probably from your neighbourhood radio shack Lol... Thanks for the help,
Oh snap how would I go about doing the turing part? can someone start me off with a line or two or an explanation.. I am dumb..

[Neo]

For that you'll need to consult your teacher. If you made a circuit board Im sure he has told you how to turn on an led using turing. I think its the parallelput() command. IMO a binary clock sounds too simple and would be useless. Last year I made an etch-n-sketch machine controlled using a homemade joystick through turing... you can try that idea if you want?

[josh]

the turing commadns used for interfacing are:

code:

parallelput ()

and

code:

parallelget ()

inside of the brackets is the pin that you want to send the signal down or receive the signal from.

I have only done output interfacing programs but lets say I connected D0 (that is the first output pin, D is for data, they range from D0 - D7 giving you a totla of 8 unique paths)

and I want to send a signal down D0 to make the led connected to it light up, I would type:

code:

parallelput (1)

to stop all the signals I would use:

code:

parallelput (0)

bassically the data table looks like this:

code:

parallelput (0) kills signals parallelput (1) sends down D0 parallelput (2) sends down D1 parallelput (4) sends down D2 parallelput ( 8 ) sends down D3 parallelput (16) sends down D4 parallelput (32) sends down D5 parallelput (64) sends down D6 parallelput (128) sends down D7

so if you wanted to send a signal down D0 and D1 you would use:

code:

paralleput (3)

because 1 + 2 is 3.

so basically you could display any 8 bit number just by typing the number in the brackets of parallelput, then connect each wire to a differnet LED, and it will display properly, now you just need a few rows to represent the different hours, minutes, and seconds and you just need to get the differnet hours, minutes, and seconds from the sytem clock.

The part I am not sure about is what you would do since their is only 8 output wires, you will have to get creative to figure out beause you will need more than 8 LED's.

EDIT: sorry, didn't see neo had already mentioned parallelput (), I was typing this when he posted.

[TheZsterBunny]

neo,

do you mean you drew on the screen with the joystick?

that sounds about the same difficulty as the binary clock.

only, the bclock wouldn't be as flashy.

you'd kinda have to have some sort of cool turing component, right?

perhaps different clock modes? (i.e. 12/24/countdown/alarm)

ooh! how about tri-colored leds? green in morning, blue in day, and red at night?

-Z

[Tony]

different colour leds are not that good of an idea since he'll be presenting it for 5 minutes tops during his class... nobody is going to wait for 12 hours to see the clock do what it does in a different colour..

the countdown mode sounds interesting enough. Especially if you time it right (such as count 1/10th of a second or something) to have a nice LED animation going

[TheZsterBunny]

1 /10?

binary!

1/8th of a second.



-Z

[Tony]

details
but yes, 1/8th makes more sence

[brianrood]

Ok, thanks for everything so far guys, I figured after some time I needed some chip a parallel chip my teacher did not have so we scrapped the binary clock, and now I am just going to be simple and make a stop light. I got creative and went and bought one of those cool stoplight lights and glow in different patterns and I unwired it all and took off the power cord so I am left with the three lights and the wires to them... I was wondering how I would do the coding I had the idea of using this:
var Green : int := 1
var Yellow : int := 2
var Red : int := 4
parallelput (Green)
loop
if parallelput (Green) then
delay (10000) and parallelput (Yellow)
end if
if parallelput (Yellow) then
delay (4000) and parallelput (Red)
end if
if parallelput (Red) then
delay (10000) and parallelput (Green)
end if
end loop

what am I doing wrong, and how could this be improved other then maiing it a big if statement with elsif's....???

[josh]

first please use code or syntac tags nect time you post.

I don't think that your if's will work becuaese I am don't think it will recognize if parallelput (green).

what you need ot do is make another variable for the status and have that change depending on the light, something like this:

code:

var Green : int := 1 var Yellow : int := 2 var Red : int := 4 var status : string parallelput (Green) status := green loop    if status = green then       delay (10000)       parallelput (Yellow)       status := yellow    elsif status = yellow then         delay (4000)         parallelput (Red)         status := red   elsif status = red then      delay (10000)      parallelput (Green)      status := green      end if end loop

so this way the if is dependant on the status variable and not on detecting what it is parallelputing,

Give that a try and if it does not work tell me adn i will try and fix it

[brianrood]

ok thanks for that, I will try it tomorrow and I will get back to you, and I have no life so I can reply right after you responded LoL, thanks a lot though man..