Learning in the second University
Attention: This page is unfinished.
First year
I entered my second University in August 2020 (in the middle of the pandemic). At the moment I will not say which University it is, for various reasons.
I entered a Mechatronics Engineering. As I mentioned in the article about my first university (IPN-UPIICSA), this was the engineering that I had selected as my first option (5 years ago).
In first year we saw structured programming with the C language. We also saw some basic electronics with Arduino (in the article "Coin Counting Machine" I talk about this).
As I already mentioned in the Android Learning article: although I already knew how to program, I really liked the programming subject, because of the way the teacher gave his classes and his very relaxed behavior. He knew how to motivate people to think and solve the exercises.
The biggest thing I remember that we did was: as a final project in programming we had to create a fictional store which would have an inventory of all its available products. It was a team effort of 4 people and this was our result:
Our store was called Rifa Games and it pretended to be a video game store.
Everything that we programmed in the C language was made for programs that were executed in the command console.
The teacher was so cool that we could afford to program funny things, like, for example, the slogan of our store without the teacher claiming us. Our store slogan reads: "Welcome to Rifa Games, where your addictions are our profit." That slogan, in real life or with some other teacher, would be a tacky slogan 😄.
All the options worked and our database was a .txt text file.
Second year
In the second year of the degree I learned many things that I did not know about electricity and magnetism. At last it was electricity at a microscopic level (so to speak). Since middle school I had always seen electricity as circuits and wires and more, but never the "why?" of electricity. Although I took an extraordinary exam due to lack of a few tenths, I was able to pass it thanks to the fact that I studied for almost a whole month watching the videos made by the teacher Cesar Antonio Izquierdo Merlo, which are very well explained and makes you understand the subject very easily. I remember many things from his videos, but what I remember the most are Kirchhoff's laws, how to solve different circuits and how magnetic fields work in a wire.
I also learned to use MATLAB, which is primarily a programming environment for mathematical functions.
In MATLAB I learned to program various things, such as: Solving Matrices using the Gauss Jordan method, finding the roots of an equation using Newton-Raphson, among many other things.
Another thing that I learned to do was to make technical drawings using AutoCAD in the subject of computer drawing.
Next, I show some of the many drawings I did in this subject:
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I learned a lot about thermodynamics. I also learned about physics in the subject of statics and dynamics. Since they don't have much to do with software at the moment, I won't put too much emphasis on them (for now).
Third year
Currently, as I am writing this, I am in the middle of my third year. Today is January 3, 2023.
I must say that I was very pleased that the teacher of the digital logic and microcontrollers subject did not pigeonhole himself in only showing us logic gates and truth tables (I have known that since high school, and at UPIICSA I saw those topics again in 2 different subjects). Here the professor wanted to go a step further and so far we have learned a lot about digital systems and microcontrollers (and we still have half a year to go).
In this subject, it only took a month for all the most basic topics to be well understood: logic gates, truth tables, binary system, Karnaugh maps and what square waves are for. I would have seen all of this in an entire semester in previous years.
We have learned how to use flip flops, make counters, multiplexers and state machines.
At the end of October 2022 we began to see what FPGA devices are, which are programmable electronic devices. But it is not conventional programming. Here circuits are programmed, or rather described.
Using the VHDL programming language (or description language), we can make any circuit we can imagine, and when we load that program to our FPGA card, a circuit will be created internally, which will be created with many electronic elements, mainly logic gates.
It is no longer necessary to make a lot of physical connections (with cables and micro chips) that is not practical and not cheap.
We have made a few programs for this FPGA and, above all, we have understood how they work and how square frequencies are handled internally.
We are currently looking at how to send and receive data through the serial or USB port.
Undoubtedly one of the best courses I've had at this university. This and the programming in first year.
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At first, one of the most important reasons I chose this career was because I had programming and I thought I would learn some new things about it.
This year we are also having a programming subject: Object Oriented Programming with C++.
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THIS IS ONLY IN SPANISH NOW (Because I will update this later) / ESTO QUE VIENE SOLO ESTARÁ EN ESPAÑOL (Porque lo actualizaré más adelante)
Como proyecto final para la materia de programación en C++ hice un juego del ahorcado. Lo hice en tan solo 15 horas. ¿Porqué en 15 horas? Porque tengo el tiempo encima 😯, han pasado muchas cosas en mi vida en estos ultimos 3 meses y tengo que tener todo mi tiempo en varias cosas a la vez. Este proyecto se podía entregar hasta dentro de 2 semanas (a partir de ayer, hoy es 2 de junio de 2023). Pero quise avanzarle lo más que pude para poder terminarlo a tiempo. Y pues... ya quedó 😀.
Yo no elegí el proyecto, ni el lenguaje (ni que fuera en consola) pero fue lo que me tocó hacer.
Es el clásico juego del Ahorcado. Tú escribes en el teclado y tienes que adivinar la palabra oculta y si no, pierdes. Lo hice para que solo tuvieras 5 oportunidades de fallar.
Aunque no parezca la gran cosa, para 15 horas yo creo que está bien.
Le puse animaciones, tiene varias validaciones para que no ocurran errores. Dividí mi código en multiples archivos para tener todo un poco más ordenado. Y pues... hace lo que tiene que hacer, es un juego del ahorcado.
Tiene una base de datos que se puede editar (un archivo .txt 😄) y su forma de trabajar es la siguiente: el programa abre el archivo .txt, después lee todo el archivo y va contando todas las comas, al final con toda la cantidad de comas el programa sabe cuantas palabras o frases hay en total. Después se obtiene un número aleatorio dependiendo de cuantas palabras haya, es decir, si solo hubieran diez, se obtendría un número aleatorio del 1 al 10 (realmente es del 0 al 9... cosas de programación), pero si hubieran 120, se obtendría un número aleatorio del 1 al 120. Una vez obtenido ese número aleatorio, digamos que salió 39, el programa va a leer el archivo desde el inicio hasta encontrar la coma número 39 y a partir de ahí va a guardar todas las letras y espacios que sigan, si llega a encontrar la coma número 40 entonces ya para y el programa ahora tiene la palabra o frase completa que debe poner para que el jugador la adivine (Suena mucho, pero lo hace en menos de medio segundo).
La verdad no sabía que más ponerle 😅. Le puse un tutorial muy sencillo y ya. También le puse como editar el archivo.txt. Y le puse para que pusiera correctamente las mayúsculas y minúsculas sin importar lo que el usuario pusiera. Y... No sé que más. Ya cumple su objetivo. Y tiene animaciones.
😁
Hoy, mientras escribo esto, es Viernes 2 de Junio de 2023. Hay mucho que editar en esta sección de universidad 2.